Best Foobar file command line for sorting? / Avoid accidental merges

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1

Reposted since I think I had wrong “tags” as in, post tags.

To start, I found an issue where I had two releases that accidentally made two unrelated ones merge.

I used this for Foobar’s Operations:
%album artist%/[%date% - ]%album%/[%tracknumber%. ]%title%

It was two different versions of Die Roboter from Kraftwerk.

One from 1978, the single
Another from 1991, which was a maxi-single

It is the same, but different versions and I want to keep both seperate - avoiding issues.

Some albums are named after singles, same year, and will accidentally be merged despite being different. Or, like this case, you’ll have two different versions of the same release - but DON’T want them merged.

What would be recommended to make sure there are no accidental merges? What command lines / patterns would you use (that are able to be done on Foobar’s file operations)?

2

When you say “merged”, do you mean you have Picard set to Move and Rename folders? Leading to one folder holding the two singles?

If you have clashes like this then either fix the small number of clashes by hand by manually adjusting the album name. Or add the year to the folder names.

3

If /[%date% - ]%album% doesn’t suffice for distinguishing you need to include more tags such as disambiguation comment or MBID[1].

See also:

  1. Naming With MBIDs ↩︎

4

I tried using other identifiers like release type but there’s unfortunately issues with that (sometimes it won’t have the secondary type).

I did attempt to use a original year and release date command, but that also caused some issues.

As you and the other fella said. Best done manually at least.