Multiple duplicated folders generated

MusicBrainz Picard
1

A few days ago I noticed that one of my music folders had some duplicate directories, while I was not sure what the cause was I ran Musicbrainz against my collection as I had recently added some new music / wanted to try and update some files that were previously not matched.

The problem is that it appears as though the software created another level of directories so instead of having:

Artist --> Album – > Track

I am left with:

Artist --> Album -->Artist --> Album -->Artist --> Album -->Artist --> Album -->Track

Which means if I want to find a particular track to listen to I have to drill down through 8 directories for no reason. Is there a way to automatically remove these folders? If it were just a handful I would just update them manually, but there are at a minimum 500+ artists in my collection, some with multiple albums so doing this manually will take days.

Also, is there a setting I have incorrect in the software that is causing it to generate these additional folders? I don’t want to have to go through fixing them again if it is something I can avoid. First though I need to figure out a way to clear the duplicates and empty directories.

Thanks.

2

You probably need to specify a base directory like C:\Music, rather than .
Then if you move the files again with Picard it should work.

3 Likes
3

Looks like that might be the trick, I just started it a few minutes ago and checked on a couple folders, so far so good. I won’t know for sure until it completes saving everything, but of the couple I checked so far they are back to how I want them.

Thank you!!!

1 Like
4

One of the things I do is to put “…” (without quotes) as the directory to move files to when saving. Then, I create a folder in the file naming that has the albumartist/year/albumtitle.

E.g.:

$if2(%albumartistsort%,%albumartist%,%artist%) -- [$if(%date%,$left(%date%,4))] -- %album%/$num(%tracknumber%,2) %artist% - $left(%title%,20)

This, when used with “…” as the destination folder, basically “renames” the folder of mp3s.

5

The same thing happened to me. Did you ever figure out a way to solve it?

6

This was answered above:

2 Likes