Hello All,
I have a rather large collection I’m trying to tame.
Just curious if anybody has tried using both these programs together to organize large collections.
Obviously both programs have unique features. Just curious if anyone has tried using both of them together successfully?
Whichever you use, backup your collection before you start. That allows you to learn the systems better, and reverse any errors that can occur.
You will find a clash trying to use two different tools. Picard is built around the MusicBrainz database so can be much fussier at selecting an exact version of a release. You will need to do some manual checking and it can be a lot to learn on first few uses, but we are here to help.
AudioRanger seems to be more about getting “something” tagged and not worrying about an exact fussy match. It always makes me nervous when I see a music tool trying to remove duplicate tracks.
Probably better to run them side by side and pick one as there is a clear overlap on tasks.
I like the feature that AudioRanger has that automarks dupes then weeds them out into a seperate folder so that you can delete them easily later. I have lots of dupes.
What’s missing on AudioRanger though is MBP’s scan feature that actually verifies the actual music track audio to the song/artist.
So, I’ve been trying to scan first using MBP verifying the audio track then weed out the dupes. Make sense?
THough, none of the programs has a bulk feature that I need for renaming in large quanities.
My question would be: Do you care about precise albums and metadata? Or are you just trying to get the song name and artist, the source/album doesn’t really matter?
If it’s the second, Picard is probably more precise than what you need. Though I guess you could just run scan on a whole collection, which will be very fuzzy.
If you’re just using AudioRanger for dupe checking, a simple hack is to use Picard and search your folder for (1) afterwards (depending on your settings, if you’re saving the same song into different folders this wont work)
Where are the source files from? If you have ripped your own CDs, then Picard is easier to work with. Easier to check
If this is a heap of tracks from various random torrents, then you will need to to a fair bit of double checking. Yes, Picard’s Scan is excellent - but not perfection. Maybe 95% hit rate. So 1 in 20 may be out. The rougher your tags, the lower quality the audio, the more misses you’ll get.
Go into OPTIONS \ METADATA \ PREFERRED RELEASES and mess with the sliders. If you have a heap of files and just want names an images, then you are less interested in Compilations. So push Compilations to the left, and push Album\Single\EP to the right.
AcoustIDs will be matching tracks on all kinds of sources, and this includes compilations. Kick these sliders around to twist the priorities of the match. Otherwise you may keep getting artwork from NOW collections.
If you have good CD rips, then you’ll get whole album matches. “Lookup” will work better for you if you have good tags.
If you have junk tags and just want to ID things, then SCAN will “listen” to the track and make a “best guess” match.
Also in Picard, go look at the OPTIONS \ PLUGINS and find “The AudioDB cover art” and “Fanart.tv cover art” to get a wider selection of artwork if image is more important than accuracy.
So what do you have? And what is your aim? the point is Picard is a main bladed Swiss Army knife that has the tool for what you need, if you sped time working out how to tune it.
Thank you IvanDobsky
Sorry for my delayed response but your tip was VERY helpful.
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.
I’m just trying to ensure I am spending my time wisely by using this program correctly. ANy tips are much appreciated.
Here is the file naming script that produced the above image:
$if2(%albumartist%,%artist%)/%album%/$num(%tracknumber%,2) - %title% - %artist%
I’d say about 40% of the songs I’m dealing with are .mp3 files that got scrambled, duplicated and lost artwork/songs. The other 60% of my files are from CD .flac rips of LPS I own.
Thanks, bob
I recognise the scenario… have seen it first hand. Not great.
The “don’t throw too many files at a time” is mainly based on the amount of manual work you need to check things. And in your scenario you have more checking that unusual as I assume everything is just file000245.flac.
Does your recovery tool at least split the flac and mp3 apart? Or is it all just blank files with no file extensions?
I assume the files have the tags still in place? This is where the “cluster first” advice does kick in. Cluster and Lookups just read the tags and jump to less random albums.
What state are the tags in? What were they added by? If Picard, then Only lookups are the key. if something decent then still a Lookup will be much better at getting albums right. A scan is only used if no tags exist and you need Picard to “listen” to the track to find a match.
Hi Ivan,
Initially, I did a search on my Win10 PC for all file types, such as *.mp3, *.flac, *.wma, *.m4p, etc… Then I created individual folders to put each file type in. All my music files had various amounts of completed tags. Some were almost complete while others had none and the file name such as 001429.Mp3. I used a combo of AudioRanger and Music Brainz Picard (MBP) to add tags to as many files as I could so that when I used the de-dupe software I could tell what to delete. It got tricky trying use either AudioRanger or Music Brainz Picard because the programs would crash because of the sheer volume of what I was trying to tag. I was forced to break each file type folder into smaller folders so that I could upload each folder at a time to process the tags. My main goal at this stage was to identify what I had and then de-dupe. I have processed a large amount files so far but now I’m trying to figure out how to use (MBP) across different hard drives to fill in all the songs that are missing in my LP tags. For example, I may have had an old itunes music folder that had all my music organized by folder on my Drive C but I also may have had another music drive where I kept another music list on my D Drive. See what I mean? I’m still not sure how to handle my main two different types of music files using (MBP). That is, all my ripped CDs are *.flac files while my long-time music collection is *.mp3. HOw do I manage two different libraries? Combine them? Or separate them? Also using (MBP), It seems to redownload images everytime I upload files for processing and it takes forever to get through the upload. IS there a way to speed this up and just upload the music tags first and embed them so that (MBP) doesn’t have to re-upload them? I have questions like this.
Too many things to answer in one block, so bullet points.
First just focus on reading tags in the files, and recovering files purely from lookups. And those lookups can be used to re-write filenames. I don’t use Filenaming scripts so can’t help details there.
I do use MP3TAG to use tags to create filenames. This is going to make much more sense with the current state of your files. MP3TAG could look at your raw recovered files and just move the album - trackno - artist - track names from tags and rename files using that data that is in the recovered file. That alone would recover a LOT.
If you had well tagged files, AVOID “scan” in Picard. AcoustID will feck you files worse than they are now. Only use AcoustID \ Scan if you have no tags.
Just a small additional note here: if some files indeed don’t have any tags then lookup won’t work. Use scan in these cases to identify by audio. But do those separately and be prepared that it might identify the track but you might want to change the release. These cases definitely need more manual checking of the result.
As @outsidecontext says, Scan is mainly for when you have no tags at all. I only meant don’t use it here on this specific case. After a disc crash and the use of recovery software you should still have all the tags exactly like before. Only the filenames will be lost.
If the recovery software gave you back files without tags then you have more to worry about as that implies truncated files and lost music.
This statement is a little concerning. Play those tracks where tags have been lost. You will likely find you have lost the end of the music and it will need to be binned. From previous recovery experience I find there are times when the recovery tools recover scraps of data. These are easy to spot as you find you have lots of files of an identical length.
If you previously know you had everything tagged, then anything that has now not got a tag should be considered corrupted. Yes, AcoustID will “Scan” it and find a match, but it will not put the audio back that has been lost.
This is also a potential reason for the crashes. If you have corrupted / truncated files, then Picard\AudioRanger will be getting confused.
When I have done this task in the past, I used MP3TAG’s ability to rebuild filenames from tags. This then left me batches of tagless corrupted files to study to see if they were worth recovering further.
unfortunately, I scanned these files many moons ago and repeatedly because of ignorance. So, the damage is done. WHen I try to do lookups I get a lot of “no matching tracks found messages” or “not matching files found beyond the threshold” whatever that means. I own AudioRanger which is an update of Mp3 Magic Tagger. THis program is interesting because it weeds out duplicates while pulling in tags and artwork. Do you have any experience with it?
And yes, I did have to delete many music files that were truncated…so, as I said the damage was done. At this point I’m trying to dedupe, tag, organize and recoup my losses and be done with it. But this is proving not to be as easy as it sounds.
Those files will be the ones that initially had no tags. I also expect they are all the same size. (Or were before images were embedded). I believe Tags are usually written at the end of a music file, hence why they are chopped off by a truncated recovered file.
These corrupted files will cause havoc to many tagging programs as they are incomplete. Sometimes tagging tools can “repair” them, but they are still likely to end abruptly.
It is a bit of a pity you don’t have a frozen backup of the files as recovered. We could have done a more sane job on those. After multiple passes through AcoustID and AudioRanger retagging I think anything reliably useable is now lost 
Sorry, no idea about AudioRanger. One thing I have learnt after decades with computers is if you want a mess, then let automation run riot.
Just to clarify: if these are MP3 files that were tagged sometime in this millennium, the tags are probably at the beginning of the files – see e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ID3#ID3v2. (There may be ID3v1 tags at the end too, but most players should ignore them when ID3v2 tags are present.) I think that FLAC is similar; less sure about other formats.
Depending on the software that was used to encode the files, the tags may contain additional information that can be used to identify truncated files (in case you haven’t already identified them all). https://www.codeproject.com/Articles/8295/MPEG-Audio-Frame-Header#XINGHeader has some technical details, but I think that there’s a bunch of “MP3 repair” software that can compare the frame count from the XING header (written when the file was encoded) against the actual number of frames in the file. But like @IvanDobsky said, those programs are just going to update the header to reflect the true (now-truncated) length.
I agree with the advice that’s been given so far. Look up the already-tagged songs, manually assign untagged songs where you can (e.g. if they’re in the same directory as the rest of an album), and then scan everything that’s left over and hope for the best.
Well, after reading your last post…all that technical stuff about tags is way over my head. I’m dealing with sheer massive amounts of duplication. My logic is if I can somehow find a tool that can tag all my files in bulk I would be ahead of that game because at least then I know what I have. AudioRanger tags in bulk pretty well up to 10k files. It also separates Artists, Compilations and Duplicates by creating a folder for each. Once I’ve done that I guess I can then use MBP to do touch up on selected artists.
if I can somehow find a tool that can tag all my files in bulk I would be ahead of that game because at least then I know what I have.
There are such tools! 
beets
If the idea of using a command-line program doesn’t freak you out, beets can do that bulk tagging automatically. (The command-line part is little more than running beet import on your music folder.) Like Picard, beets can look up tags and fingerprints in MusicBrainz. It can check other sources, too, if find that you need them.
Setting your preferences means making a file like this. Your config would be much simpler—probably half that length. Go through the config options one by one and add what you need. Most of them are on/off settings. You can search for duplicates while tagging, or in a second pass later on.
iTunes Match
It sounds like a lot of your files are both unknown and potentially corrupt. iTunes Match might be able to help you there. We had some CD rips that got badly corrupted. The files did not play properly. iTunes Match ID’d them even though they were corrupt, and through the service I was able to replace them with pristine M4A files. Not only did I have perfect files, the sound quality was better than my old MP3s.
iTunes Match works well for MP3 and WMA files, but don’t use it for your FLACs. The service has a flat annual subscription fee, and you can submit up to 100,000 files at a time. So, if you want to try this you may not want to delete your corrupt files just yet. 
