Dealing with tracks (multiple files) that appear in multiple albums

Hi,

Trying to sort out my music library, which is a smattering of CD rips, album and single downloads from Amazon and other sources.

I’ve got an issue at present where i’ve got albums that have the same track, but the first album appears to have 3 copies of the file, and the other albums say they’re missing it. Other albums have tracks missing as the track has been assigned (erroneously) to an album i’ve never owned (by a previous software, not Picard).

Is there any way to scan the entire music directory to find the “missing” tracks of albums I know are complete, and only keep one file for each track to prevent other albums missing their copy?

Cheers

you can scan your entire music directory with Picard but you can not scan to many at one time or it will probably crash, ie if you try 100000 in one hit (you can get around it bu scanning a few thousand then adding more when they have been scanned). to scan all of your songs in one hit just select the folder they are in. then when it has stopped adding them you can select unclustered files then hit scan or you can open settings after you open Picard and then select automatically scan all new files and it will scan them as they are added to Picard

There’s no automated way to do this. However, once an album loads in Picard, you can drag tracks to it if it guesses wrong about where they go.

If it doesn’t find the right album at all, you can look it up in MusicBrainz using the lookup in browser command, or just manually searching (if it’s really not there you can add it, but that’s a big tangent). Depending on how you get there, you can copy and paste the link into Picard’s search box or use the green Tagger button to load it.

After you’ve saved it with Picard once it should retain not only the name of the album but also its MBID, so the next time you load it Picard will know exactly where it goes.

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