Software beyond MusicBee

[homertx]

Zak, great comments. Thank you for the candid insight. I'll have to give mp3tag another look.

How do you approach, with tools or process, the task of merging two drives together?
I have been pretty loose with my files over the years and while I thought I was creating my own divided storage plan, HA, I know don't know if the content on one drive mirrors the content on the other.  I'm looking for a tool that can read a directory structure (Artist / Album /Title) on one drive then go seek the same on the other. If found move the files to a staging Recycle folder then move on. Any heard or seen of such a thing? (I have more than one Compare program but none of them seem to do this.)

[psychoadept]

I don't know if this does what you want, but it's what I've used at work when trying to sort out duplicates:

http://www.softpedia.com/get/System/File-Management/Duplicate-cleaner.shtml

[Zak]

How do you approach, with tools or process, the task of merging two drives together?
I have been pretty loose with my files over the years and while I thought I was creating my own divided storage plan, HA, I know don't know if the content on one drive mirrors the content on the other.

There are programs that will scan file tags and try to identify duplicates, but that requires your files to already be tagged and named reasonably well.

My task was to merge three large collections together, one of which was mangled by having been passed through iTunes auto-organiser more than once. Call me crazy, but in the end I decided the best way - if not the fastest - was to do it manually.

I created folders A-Z for artists and separate folders for compilations, soundtracks etc. Then I moved almost everything from all three sources into them. It was a horrible mess at that point, but from there it was much easier to identify duplicates myself. It would be a painful thing to do in Windows Explorer though. Use a dual-pane file manager (Just Manager or XYplorer are both good and free) so you can more easily compare files and folders side-by-side.

I guess it depends how "perfectly" you want your music to be organised, and how much time you're willing to spend to get it there.

[vpsaxman]

I guess it depends how "perfectly" you want your music to be organised, and how much time you're willing to spend to get it there.

Considering how many tracks I have "perfect" may never happen.

[vpsaxman]

* Everything Search - extremely lightweight free search utility and more importantly gets results instantly. Once you start using it you will wonder how you manged before that . Found at www.voidtools.com

I can't thank you enough for recommending this. It's changing my life!!

[ma_t14]

* Everything Search - extremely lightweight free search utility and more importantly gets results instantly. Once you start using it you will wonder how you manged before that . Found at www.voidtools.com

I can't thank you enough for recommending this. It's changing my life!!

Glad it was useful. Everything Search, Launchy and ArsClip are the 3 main utilities I cannot do without. Once you get used to them and incorporate them into your work-flow anything else seems "inefficient".

[psychoadept]

If anyone else is using Cheetah Sync for a "two-stage" sync to mobile device, I just switched to BitTorrent's Sync app.  It's a little more confusing to set up, but it's super fast to configure/change/run, and based on my short experimentation so far, seems to do a better job of tracking changes.

[phred]

If anyone else is using Cheetah Sync for a "two-stage" sync to mobile device, I just switched to BitTorrent's Sync app.  It's a little more confusing to set up, but it's super fast to configure/change/run, and based on my short experimentation so far, seems to do a better job of tracking changes.

Yes, I've been using Cheetah for about a year and have found it suitable for my needs.  But as the directories get larger, Cheetah is slowing down.  Which is understandable.  But I'll be checking out BitTorrent's app shortly.  Thanks for the tip.

[psychoadept]

Let me know if you have any issues.  I tested with some smaller folders first, but when I added my music folder it seemed to run through and recognize all the files that were already there and didn't need an update, and it updated the playlists when I changed them.

I set it up to only sync manually unless it's charging. The history window on the desktop end is very helpful and one of the big improvements over cheetah.

[phred]

Let me know if you have any issues.  I tested with some smaller folders first, but when I added my music folder it seemed to run through and recognize all the files that were already there and didn't need an update, and it updated the playlists when I changed them.

I mainly use Cheetah for copying photos taken with my cell over to my PC.  For syncing music there's a great app call MusicBee that I've been using for years and it syncs quite nicely.

But what I really don't like about the BitTorrent Sync is that it's constantly connecting to a BitTorrent server and a GetSync server, along with what my firewall tells me is an "unknown" server.  I've never seen Cheetah connect with anything outside my LAN.  If BitTorrent Sync is only supposed to be syncing files between my devices, then why is it contacting all these other servers? One reason (I suppose) is the Cheetah only works on my WiFi network and BitTorrent may allow me to sync from my phone to my PC when I'm away from my home WiFi.  I'm not sure about that, but I am uncomfortable with those potentially nefarious connections.

[psychoadept]

Fair enough. I don't know about the remote sync functionality.

Update: I take it back.  It has been remote syncing today (when on wifi).  Wow.

Update 2: It looks like you can disable the remote servers in the Preferences.  http://help.getsync.com/hc/en-us/articles/204754349-Can-I-force-Sync-to-do-local-network-LAN-syncing-only-and-not-sync-via-the-Internet-

[ma_t14]

I thought I'd make an update since the original post was 3 years old in case anyone is interested to see what changed in the meantime (not that much actually).

Here are the changes:

*Launchy replaced by KeyPirinha
*Added MPC-HC/BE as an alternative to PotPlayer
*ArsClip replaced by Ditto
*Opera browser replaced by Vivaldi
*Added Autohotkey
*Deskpins replaced by an autohotkey command.
*Fastone Image Viewer replaced by HoneyView

Original post has been updated to reflect these.

[boroda]

*ArsClip replaced by Ditto

++1

[alec.tron]

* Listary - type-to-locate done right, free but pro version available. Gets better and better with every release. It may replace everything search for me in the future but for now searching is not what I use it for.

Neat-o, thanks for that!


Random question - neither my trusty old foobar, nor the old 2.5 or shiny new MusicBee 3 seems to have a good way for this - I want to see my whole library's ID3 tag versions on each file in column view, i.e. I want to see which file still has ID3v1/ID3v1.1 tags written, and most likely remove altogether, or, if it were the only ID3 info, move to ID3v2.4 UTF-8.
mp3tag does show the ID3 version info as needed, but it's less ideal as it's meant to work/be edited in batches, not on the whole library, and I don't really get warm with its GUI...

Churs.
c.

[hiccup]

neither my trusty old foobar, nor the old 2.5 or shiny new MusicBee 3 seems to have a good way for this - I want to see my whole library's ID3 tag versions on each file in column view, i.e. I want to see which file still has ID3v1/ID3v1.1 tags written, and most likely remove altogether, or, if it were the only ID3 info, move to ID3v2.4 UTF-8.
mp3tag does show the ID3 version info as needed, but it's less ideal as it's meant to work/be edited in batches, not on the whole library, and I don't really get warm with its GUI...

You could formulate this as a wish in the wishlist.
I'd support it.