I had the unfortunate circumstance of having an event happen to a HDD which left my files inaccessible. I did have a backup, but it was incomplete, so not a full backup. I have recovered my files, but they are not named in the fashion that I like, in fact some are only named by number. The files are a mix of music, video, text type and zip type files. I have either Windows 11 or openSuse tumbleweed OSes.
Would someone please recommend software that would rename my music and video files using the musicbrainz database and the existing meta data of these files? I would like to have a specific structure in renaming. [i.e.] - (Artist - Song title) The music and video files are the concern,there are quite a number of them, the others I can do myself. One other concern is that I would not want to delete duplicates, but rather place them in a separate folder.
Are the files in good folders still? Or a just a big heap?
Number one - I would make a snapshot backup before starting the work. Something you can refer back to.
Scan\AcoustID can get some idea of what you have, but you as a human need to check. AcoustID may look a folder of music and see multiple different sources, but you as the human will know that folder is all the same album.
If you have a memory of what you own, then you the human will always be the only reliable check as to what Scan\AcoustID can match.
A compilation album is always the biggest puzzle as tracks will appear on multiple albums. In those cases it is almost easiest to select the album in MusicBrainz yourself and then find tracks to match.
If it was me, I’d have a two folders. One labelled “Chaos” the other labelled “Order”. Slowly moving batches of files from Chaos to Order. Knowing some obvious album matches I own, and narrowing down a smaller and smaller heap of chaos.
Ultimately there is no simple way to rebuild albums automatically.
I feel your pain. This is why I have four levels of backups…
How accurate is the metadata (inside?) your files?
The more complete your local metadata is, the easier it is to rename your files according to fields such as TITLE, ARTIST, ALBUM and YEAR.
I missed that metadata was intact. Are the files still in album folders? Just lost their file names due to the data recovery software? Then you can ignore AcoustID and just do normal “Lookup” scans with Picard. Work folder by folder (or at least on batches of folders).
I still strongly recommend human checking. But then that is an excuse to play your music while you work.
The ideal would be if you had already tagged everything with Picard and you still have those MBIDs inside your tags. If that is the case, then you can feed everything rather quickly through Picard and let its file naming \ moving do its thing.
