Hi,
New to Picard (still don’t understand the left window/right window use or relationship fully) but, I now have lots of duplicated tracks… any way to dedupe?
thx
No - Picard does not sort through and delete your duplicated files. You’ll need to find other dedup tools for that kind of task.
Picard is a tool to attempt to identify your tracks and albums, and then update the tags in the files.
Picard uses the MusicBrainz database to attempt to work out what your files are.
Picard is more about getting the tag data correct.
If you have very obscure tracks they may not be in the database. In those cases you can then add to MusicBrainz yourself.
If you have a very chaotic heap of MP3 files from all kinds of sources then it would be a good idea to identify and tag in small batches. That allows you to check what is happening as you go along.
“Left window” lets you group the files into “Clusters”. A “cluster” would be something like a single album.
You then use the Lookup or Scan button to tell Picard to take those “clusters” and attempt to find them in the MusicBrainz database. It will then assemble the results on the right hand side.
“Lookup” uses the file names and current tags.
“Scan” will listen to the track and make an AcousticID and use that to find a match in the database. This is usually more reliable. (I always press the SCAN button and never use LOOKUP)
Once you are happy that the albums in the right hand side are correct, you use the SAVE button to re-write the tags on those files.
That is from top of my head and there are TONS more features in Picard. So start with just a couple of albums to learn how it works first. Everyone here tends to use Picard in slightly different ways. You will make mistakes while you go along - but if we never made mistakes then we would learn nothing.