I’m relatively new to MusicBrainz Picard. I’ve watched some videos and read through the forums and have an ok understanding. When sorting mp3s the other day, it was able to cluster and find album info for about 90% of my stuff. But that other 10% it couldn’t locate…likely as they were mixtapes.
My question…
This was a folder (A) of mp3’s that I ran through MBP. For fear of losing data, I had the preferences set so that the renamed files go into a new folder (B). The plan was to first verify all the music was there and named accordingly (folder B), then delete the original folder (A) to save file space.
The problem I have…what do I do with that remaining 10% it couldn’t locate? Just because the tag info was not found doesn’t mean I want to lose that music. And the way that original folder (A) was organized, it would be hell going through trying to find which ones weren’t tagged.
Does that make sense?
They (the 10% it couldn’t find album info on) are all in clustered folders on the left pane. I tried to right-click and save, but nada. Further when I open the folders, now the mp3s within are red with a ‘-’ in front of them. Assume that means the file cannot be found? I’m really confused.
If I understand you right, you had Picard copy the renamed files instead of move. Is that right?
I think the way I’d do it, is verify the files in the new folder look like your renaming script is working right, then rename the new folder and repeat the process, this time move instead of copy. Once you verify it worked, then delete the old new folder.
Now you should have a new folder with properly tagged files and the original folder with the 10% of the files that couldn’t be matched.
Yes, that is 100% correct. Thank you for rephrasing it for me!
I didn’t think about doing that. Move the files instead of renaming. I’ll try that.
Ok part 2 of the question then. That last 10% it couldn’t find the album info, but it did cluster them into folders. May be asking too much, but for those files that weren’t moved, is there a way to cluster/group them…even without the album info?
If it’s clustering them into folders, then they probably have data in the “album” field. The problem could be that the corresponding release hasn’t been added or the data in the album field of your file could be wrong. For example a certain Beatles album is commonly called “The White Album”, but the official name (and thus the name in MB) is “The Beatles”.
Try searching for a couple of the albums on the website and see if they exist. If you can find them, drag the address line from your browser to the right pane of Picard, then drag the cluster from the left pane to the release in the right pane and hit save on it. If the release isn’t in MB, then you’ll either have to add it or use something else like mp3Tag or Foobar to rename the file. We’d rather you added it, of course.
Another way to match your files is to use “Scan” instead of “Lookup”. This will try to use an acoustic fingerprint of your files to match them to recordings in the database. I never do that, so I’ll let someone else post about it.
Ok so this is what happened. Prior to me running these files through MB, I had them organized into folders I created by artist and album. I didn’t realize I did indeed have that set to move files. When I went back in and drilled down into the folders, I saw that MB had extracted the mp3s, tagged them, reorganized and placed into a new folder. So the remaining folders were full of album jpgs and booklets from certain albums.
There’s a setting somewhere in options for moving other files along with the music files. That doesn’t help you now, but you could set it for future tagging.