OK, I have a very large music collection that fell victim of a bad hard drive and got scrambled. I’m picking up the pieces and trying to re-organize my collection using MusicBrianz Picard (MBP), AudioRanger and a de-duplication program called Duplicate Cleaner 5. I understand that (MBP) can only handle a reasonable amount of files thrown at it, but this complicates my process of tagging the files, then de-duping them and eventually getting the GOLD Star of a Perfect LP in (MBP).
I was wondering if anyone can suggest to me a workflow with the above scenario? How would you go about cleaning up a music collection with all the restraints? I’m pretty sure I don’t have all my settings optimized under the OPTIONS menu for the fastest processing and efficiency.
I’m using a file naming script that was suggested t me here on the Forum but it is effectively doubling the amount of LPs it clusters. This adds to the problem of number of files I can process befre the program crashes. See example below.
Repeated from your other thread
Tag/folder naming script changes shouldn’t change anything except what happens when you press ‘save’, so it’s unrelated - someone correct me if I’m wrong thanks.
Hi! If you follow this order in Picard:
Cluster > Lookup
It will keep clusters together. Scan as well as not clustering files first will not do this.
Well I’m pressing save because it takes forever to upload the sheer volume of files that I’m dealing with and sometime (MBP) crashes so my thinking was maybe (or wishful thinking on my part) that (MBP) would “remember” and not take so much time when I have to restart after a crash and re-upload the same folder for processing.
ANy idea why I’m getting the same LP clustering TWICE with songs not being consolidated into ONE LP cluster? That would be a very helpful response that could get me a bit further down the road to a solution. THanks, bob
If you have all the tracks on the left, with an ‘album’ tag, and then hit ‘cluster’ they will always go into one cluster. Then hitting ‘lookup’ on that cluster will keep the files together.
But I suspect I am missing a piece of the puzzle of your process - are you saying in your OP that because the files are so jumbled you can’t do the whole album at once? Meaning you never have all the tracks in one cluster?
All I can think of is that you can just hit ‘save’ on your collection even though the tracks are spread among different versions (don’t spend long on this first pass). Then things will at least be in the same artist folder, and you know you’re getting whole albums at once if you drag that into Picard - check ‘Ignore MBIDS when loading new files’ in Picard options > general. Then cluster and lookup for real.
If you are crashing Picard, it ain’t gonna remember anything. You will just end up with a mess of badly tagged files. Go play some of the tagged tracks. Are they correct?
I don’t know what you are doing to cause the crashing, but consider backing off. Reducing how much you are doing in one go. Stop getting artwork. Turn off them extra plugins. Just focus on IDing the tracks and albums. Once done it is easier to add the artwork on a later pass. De-dup afterwards. Stop trying to do it all in one hit. That ain’t never going to happen.
Getting things ID’d twice - use the media player to play them. Are they really the same track?
Focus on the Tags you have now. That is the data that was in the original file. That was valuable. (but over-write it with Picard and it is lost…)
The main workflow I recommend is - backoff, simplify, narrow the tasks. ID first using current tags, check it, artwork later, dedup later. Aim at a Multi-Pass method as it will save you time in the longer run.
