re-process correctly tagged files

MusicBrainz Picard
1

Ok… I had a massive screw-up by trusting Gemini…

I went through re-tagging about 200gb of music, and it was all set and done, saved neatly to Clean / Artist / Album / Song . It was beautiful. However I had leftovers in my Dirty folder. And I wanted to remove junk and keep possible missed files in a Purgatory folder, just in case I noticed something wrong.

So I ran a bash command that Gemini gave me - without checking it, but it moved my actual entire hdd to the purgatory, and more over it removed the entire folder structure.

I’m now in panic mode :’) I shifted the scrubbed files, thanks to their distinct filename, into a different folder, and I re-added them to Picard. However, Picard is now querying the Musicbrainz API and trying to match each of these files to existing album.

But since I already went through this exercise, I know that the meta data on the files is correct. Can’t I just skip the lookup step, and ‘trust’ whatever is in the meta data of the files. To then save them back to the folder structure it needs.

This also helps me identify any files that got lost (due to conflicting file names). While I am afraid if everything will be rescanned, MusicBrainz/Picard will mess up. (given that non of these files sit in their respective dir).

2

Yes, that’s possible. If you select “Ignore MBIDs when loading new files” Picard will keep the files on the left pane.

For the renaming and moving to folders it does not matter if you save the files from the left or the right pane, the only thing that matters is that the metadata used by the renaming script is present.

A typical problem saving from the left pane is usually missing metadata, e.g. files missing the albumartist tag before they got tagged with Picard. But since you already fully tagged the files, the data should be there.

Just try this with a few files or albums before you mass update all files again :slight_smile:

When the files automatically get moved to the right and load the releases there this happens because your previous run wrote the proper MusicBrainz IDs to the files. So this step actually should be fine, as it knows exactly which releases to load. But yes, it can take a long time.

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