Author Topic: Library is a mess now after coming over from iTunes. Please help!!  (Read 28654 times)

Bee-liever

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Thank you for listening, Steven
IMHO removing the "copy files when adding to library" option from the auto-organise page and the inclusion of warning messages is the best problem-solving-but-backwards-compatible solution that could be achieved
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Steven

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actually on further reflection i will probably completely remove the option to copy files into the library. The reason being i think people tend to ignore/ forget about the warning. Also the same issue of duplication can arise when using the File Scanner to add new files.
I will remove the option and then see how much push-back there is over the 2.3 beta period

djscottallen

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Wow, it looks like my little problem has sparked quite the discussion. After fooling around with settings and follow all of your advice, I finally managed to fix my library, and I have to say, I LOVE musicbee. It's great.

The problem came when I tried to move my library to a seperate drive. It's actually not a seperate hard drive, but a partition on the same drive meant for "basic files" instead of system files. Trying to have musicbee auto-organize my library files onto another drive letter caused quite a problem. The fact of this, plus having the "copy files" checked gave me duplicate files and music in 3 different locations.  Musicbee states clearly on the FAQ / instructions page under Library that moving from one drive to another is not supported at this time.  I didn't see this until afterward.

I now have a flawlessly manicured music library that is automatically organized by musicbee.
I have a ton of suggestions to make musicbee better, but it's still MILES beyond iTunes or Winamp. I can't wait to see what upgrades are made to this product.

SIDE NOTE: 
1.  If some very user friendly "Audacity" audio leveling software (amplify/normalize) is implemented within musicbee at an acceptable level of quality and confidence that it wouldn't ruin my music files, I would consider purchasing add ons/plugins at a reasonable price. Something to consider. The music player and all functionality should always remain free, but optional and very polished plugins available to purchase might be a good idea. I love your product and would happily support it.
2.  You guys should get with Virtual DJ to integrate your media player into it's program like iTunes. Speaking as a DJ, this would realllly help me. Food for thought

Thank you all for your help & thank you for musicbee!!
Last Edit: November 25, 2013, 06:46:24 PM by djscottallen

Amethystlover

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I too am one of those who made the mistake of doing too much at once, it was so easy to do!  MB was doing everything I wanted, seemed so straightforward, easy to use, understandable etc unlike so many other media players I test drove that I assumed (I know what assume means and that's why I have spent the last month cleaning my system up as I had 100,000+ files when it happened and didn't write anything nasty as I knew it was my own fault!)

But here is my issue, not sure what to do for now I have unchecked all sorts transfers etc until I get my audio files straightened out.  But now that I have duplicate up to 30 copies of one file it's not easy to clean up.  The ones with 30 copies no problem, but the cleaners still make you decide which is original file to keep, so with 100,000+ files it is very time consuming and then trying to maintain file structures it driving my OCD nuts.  The other issue with MB to do duplicates with Unknown file names, I had music files that are missing tags, can't find them and are in a file called "name that tune" that I try to name and then find a tag so system will quit pulling it up.  But Can't run duplicate until they are repaired or so the system lets me know.  Will run update and see how it goes with cleaning now. 

But I didn't know that it didn't work on external drives.  My audio files is over 500 Gig, so is on external drive and my hard drive, was trying to copy over to external only but then ran into this mess, so now have 200 G on my hard drive and 350G on external and from my searching I found files that hadn't moved due to name too long file errors that are still on hard drive or MB seen as duplicate but actually wasn't but the album was unnamed.  So I have been using MB to clean up but not sure if I am making progress or not. But what I did was display filename and path along with the other standard files and going through by album and checking each one individually.  Time consuming but as my music is on 2 different drives I am finding that my files are everywhere so  with going through I can pick and choose which ones I keep, which ones I delete and make sure I get the entire album and not missing one track or update any missing information like title or artist if another copy has gotten it before I delete it.  There has to be an easier way to do this but for now I think this is the safest.  For now my delete file is going to a back up file and not actually delete unless it's more than 2 copies.  Any suggestions to clean this up would be great. 

Help with missing tags for old music or collections like Time Music or Top 100 of the 60's would be super helpful rather than listening to the song and trying to remember or looking up the lyrics and do searches for each one then deciding which artist and forget the album issue.  This is what happens when you copy other people's files and add to your own blindly when you didn't know better.  Or victim of a bad program.

Thanks so much, I'll get this mess cleaned up yet!  MB has been the best by far for help! The people on this forum have been great! and to know the creator is still in control and actually listens is amazing and why I recommend this over and over again.

psychoadept

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For IDing the untagged files, you might try a program like MusicBrainz' Picard, or another program that can scan the audio fingerprint and match it to the MusicBrainz database.  Be cautious at first, because there can still be mismatches, but I think for the majority of your files you will at least get an ID that way, and then you can do more precise tagging once you've got the bigger mess sorted out.
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Amethystlover

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I have been using that one and then another small free program called "Free Music Tag Finder" and have been able to find some of them.  The Tag Finder has found some of the old music or not popular stuff and old collection or K-Tel type files.  But still have more files to try.  The only problem with these type of programs is yes I get the name of the song and then the artist name "hopefully" and it wasn't a remake or "cover".  But now I have all of the these albums with just one track on them or my files with missing artist name or album name change so actually just moving from one incomplete folder to another.  I run searches for albums based on artist ie all the files with 1 - 5  tracks sort by album and see if anything comes up, who knows could be an album that I downloaded and the information didn't come through or from someone else. But it's the Various Artist files I have the most problems with, no idea how to search with all the different artists names for some unknown album.  One day I will get this done.  I'm home with nothing better to do I guess.  Name that tune for one is alright I guess ::)

djscottallen

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It sounds like you're worse off than I was.  :o  I feel your pain lol.  I'm now back to my original library pretty much 18,000+ songs, 154gb.  I only had a handful of missing music tags, unless something happened that I didn't know about lol.  I just docked musicbee on the right and windows explorer on the left and compared music using the search bar.  I watched the file get deleted while deleting it in musicbee. Hard to explain, but the point was to first delete the copied music from the other locations that were NOT my main music library on drive D: Basic Files.  Any file in other location were 99% of the time duplicates. I just made sure they were and then deleted them one by one. Once I was down to ONE organized library location, that made it easier.  Then I just sent the duplicates to the inbox and deleted accordingly based on BITRATE, FILE SIZE, TRACK LENGTH, FILE NAME, ETC... Also, a combo of search bar and sorting the files by these criteria helped to weed out duplicates also.   It's still extremely time consuming, but I got it done fairly quickly. Sounds like you're doing the right thing with taggin your music. That's what I would do.  MB has that function already built in, but it doesn't work that great. I would say it's about 60% accurate. Anyways,  Good luck to you, it's not fun.
Last Edit: November 30, 2013, 05:41:18 PM by djscottallen

Amethystlover

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I agree on the 60% time of being correct, sometimes just playing with possible name combination and it comes up. 

For now trying to organize my complete music file to one drive with no duplicates.  Going to be time consuming but keep finding little tricks along the way to speed it up.   Once I get the worst of this cleaned up and on my portable hard drive then will post my question on the best way to maintain the back up drive as main file.  I just want to be able to add music from any source ie down load a torrent/cd/disk/online from a shared folder have it save to my portable drive always but I want to be able to have access without the portable drive attached to my computer, so say my favourite tracks in my laptop's music file and not come up as duplicates, but I'm a ways away from that.

Making a list of wishes and bugs but will post when I'm sure it's not operator error.

EnduringGuerila

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You wanted push-back Steven, here it is. Removing an option that is already implemented is silly. The vast amount of options/customizability is what makes Musicbee a good player. You just removed one of the features I loved about it, and now I am going to downgrade to 2.2.
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themmm

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Hi!

Removing the Option killed the use of MusicBee for me totally. This was my Nr.1 reason why i switched from MediaMonkey to MusicBee!

Edit:

Ok now i am back in the game. I had to change my workflow on how i import new songs to the library.

I used to to import new songs from a usb-stick or external harddrive, by dropping the from the windows explorer into the "new files" (called "Neuzugang" in german) folder. Then i tagged them using the "Album Auto-Tag" feature (strg-shift-t) and afterwards they were copied to the Library automatically (and that didnt work anymore). Just to explain why i was a little angry about the change :).

THX@Steven i think MusicBee is still the Best Software for managing and playing my music!
Last Edit: January 18, 2014, 09:02:40 PM by themmm



dylstew

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heh, I never use automatic featrues like that because I'm afraid of things like this happening.
When I imported my library to musicbee, I noticed I made a lot of tagging errors that other music players didn't recognize, so I manually corrected them. This actually helped me in creating  an almost perfect library.


lordlance

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Hallo everybody. I upgraded MusicBee, and I found that warning about the option removed. I loved that function. I selected the "musictemp" folder, then putting there all the new music, than I went into MusicBee and let it to scan that folder, and copy the new music in my "official" auto-organized folder. Never a problem. I had a good library, this way.
Then I'm here to ask: what I have to do to keep working in a similar way?
And, if I can't, what is the "new way"? Do I need to copy the new, non-organized files in my organized music folder, then go in MusicBee, and make a RESCAN, choosing the same folder for the scan function AND the "add to the library"?

Help me to understand this, I don't like to lose music files 'cause the software doesn't copy the files in my organized music folder...

redwing

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You could either use computer node in left navigator and select files> right click> Send to> Folder copy command with MB or just use Windows Explorer to copy files to a folder and then import to MB. As long as you keep original files outside of MB monitored folders, either way would be fine.

The reason the feature was removed was that some people tend to keep their music folder monitored with copy option enabled. Then the same files keep getting imported to library and turned into tons of duplicates.