From time to time, I stumble upon releases with messed-up mediums, where tracks are wrongly placed in the same medium. Recently, there was one particularly outrageous example:
A user created a release with 64 discs as one medium, containing 894 tracks. To the best of my knowledge, there is no easy way to move tracks from this blob to separate mediums without a lot of merging tracks afterward.
My Proposals:
Create a mechanism that allows moving tracks between mediums.
Create a mechanism to copy mediums from different releases to, for example, an anthology release, without needing to pick each recording individually (to avoid duplicating them).
You can vote and comment on a related ticket here:
Personally I think drag and drop would be amazing (the only related ticket I could find is this one), though in this case it would have to be combined with being able to drag and drop multiple tracks at once to be useful.
In the meantime, you can separate the mediums without having to create/merge new recordings:
At the bottom of the tracklist page click āadd mediumā. Select āexisting mediumā. The fields should be filled in appropriately, so you can just hit āsearchā. Select and add the same medium/release that you are currently working in.
Now click ātrack parserā on the medium. Drag-select and delete all the rows that shouldnāt be on that medium (e.g. disc 2). Hit apply. It should remove the other tracks without losing their link to their recording - test by going to the recording tab before proceeding with the rest of the discs.
Your medium split edits have broken track/recording associations.
Here is a method that does not break them, described below:
Oh, but 894 tracksā¦
The problem is step 5, when you want to delete all tracks that should not appear in current medium, you would have to remove hundreds of tracks, for each mediumā¦
Wowā¦ Impossibleā¦
etc. appear to go with the actual CDs on Discogs, which would correspond to MusicBrainz mediums - I think there should only be 11 mediums in this release. I believe the sub-headers within the CDs would be entered as tracksets when that feature is added.
Iām not sure that the track/recording links are preserved when using track parser mass remove instead of those small track remove buttonsā¦
I know Iāve already had problems with trying to do that, but Iām not so sure, it worthes a try.
This causes orphanād recordings. As @jesus2099 says the GUI can only keep up if you use the little remove buttons.
Especially when you get on to CD2,3,4 as attempting to delete tracks 1-10 in the track parser offsets all the linked recordings. And get even more chaos.
You can only fix this in the GUI by adding the 643 track medium 11 times, and then pressing those DELETE buttons on each medium thousands of timesā¦ (been there, done that )
A mess this large is almost too complex to untangle and can take hours. (Been there before, got the scars). Sometimes it is just quicker to make a NEW release, with the correct CD splits, and then Mass Merge Recordings to preserve the original 643 recordings.
To clarify: removing with the parser works, but only for medium 1. So, if you remove extra tracks after 1-n, the 1-n recording assignments will be kept. But if you remove tracks from the start, as you would need in medium 2, they wonāt be kept.
As such, I think the fastest method that works is: āremove all tracks from medium 1 from the parserā ā āremove medium 1 tracks from medium 2 pressing Xā. I have not tested whether after that you could remove medium 3 tracks from medium 2 from the parser, etc. - in any case it would get ridiculous after a couple more mediums.
@reosarevok the real trouble comes when you get down to the later mediums. Track Parser is fine for deleting the tracks AFTER the ones you want to keep, but not before. It can save some time, but when you need to delete the tracks on a medium BEFORE the ones you want to keep you have to hit the DELETE buttons to allow the GUI to shuffle. Discs 10 and 11 in this release would become hard work. Thatās a lot of clicks.
I have spent time on 8 and 16 disk sets before trying to get it to workā¦ and lost a little bit more of my sanity each time. Mass Merge Recordings saves a lot of time\sanity in those cases. Especially on a 643 track release
(none of this is meant as a criticismā¦ just trying to help save time\sanity for others)
Thank you for the tip anyway, I will save big big time knowing that I can bulk remove trailing tracks from mediums, and click the small remove buttons, only for the heading tracks!!!
Would it make sense to create each of the new medium copies after you delete the first tracks but before you delete the fallowing tracks? While youād still have to delete them individually, you wouldnāt have to do it multiple times for the same track.
Step 1: Create medium 1 from original copy
Step 2: Create medium 2 from medium 1
Step 3: Delete medium 1 tracks from medium 2
Step 4: Create medium 3 from medium 2
Step 5: Remove medium 2 tracks from medium 3
Step 6: repeat until all mediums created
Step 7: Use track parser to bulk delete following tracks from each medium
@Pelvic_Sorcery I guess you not tried your method? The problem is the way the Recordings are linked to Tracks. If you use the Track Parser to delete tracks 1 to 10 from a Medium and then go look at the Recordings page you will find everything confused and offset by ten tracks. Youāll have track 11 now pointing to Recording 1.
If if you are talking of still pressing the delete button 600+ timesā¦ that will be a quick route to RSI
Feasible on four mediumā¦ but getting to 11 and youāll likely take over an hour.
Just make a fresh release, and Mass Merge Recordings. Save your sanity and hours of time. Whacking a request into the āAsk for Votesā thread and youāll only have this around for a few days before it is solved. With no data lost.
No, Iāve never run into the situation discussed in this thread. I was just sharing a thought in case it could save people from having to click the delete button so many times.
I just tested again, and it worked fine removing a set of recordings from the start. I think I mainly do it to split up multi-vinyl releases imports that have been entered as one medium, and not that often.
I tried to change some settings to see if I could break it but I couldnāt ĀÆ_(ć)_/ĀÆ
I have recorded a gif (not of the huge release, because it takes a while for the parser and recording tabs to load, and the gif becomes huge, but you hopefully get the idea) of what I mean:
Does that not work for others? Or is there something else thatās broken that Iām not seeing?
)
