Author Topic: Seeking advice  (Read 3829 times)

Stony_Curtis

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Well I still have no clue what happened, but the bottom line is that my library's tags are pretty much completely screwed up. Artists, titles, and album titles are completely jumbled around.  I'm seeing things like Bohemian Rhapsody by the Who on the Hard Day's Night album. And when I click play, the song will be from a completely different artist. I'm baffled...but also pretty crushed. I have a pretty huge library that I've been slowly getting into shape for the last two YEARS. Now all that work is gone. I am NOT blaming the software for this, but I sure as hell wish I knew what happened. As I mentioned in a previous post, all I was doing was changing some capitalization errors using search/replace. I didn't even change any actual text.

In any case, the damage is done. My question for the board is...now what? Can anyone suggest some hints on how I might speed up/automate my damage control? I haven't had a tremendous amount of luck using the "Identify Track and Update Tags" function. Mainly because I have a ton of fairly obscure, out of print albums, including many vinyl rips. I keep getting the "failed to find match" message. Oddly, I get that message even with more common albums. I'm running the latest version of MB so the tag databases should be set up correctly.

I've was up most of the night trying to fix this. I''m tired, only partially coherent, and I'm starting to ramble so I'm going to stop now. I'll end with this...what would you do if you had this happen to you? Am I overlooking some easier way to do things? Thanks, folks.

psychoadept

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It might be worth your while to try MusicBrainz Picard.  It helps to have good tags, but it can usually identify a track from audio signature.  It definitely won't automate the process, but it can speed it up.  There are a few of us here who can advise you on it.

Link to latest version: http://build.oxygene.sk/job/package-picard-win-daily/
Last Edit: April 23, 2014, 08:03:14 PM by scampbll
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Stony_Curtis

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psychoadept

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PM me or post in the Beyond MusicBee board if you need help with it.  It takes some getting used to, but is quite powerful once you do.
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psychoadept

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Another thing that occurred to me is, if your files are organized (but not auto organized) by artist/album in some way, you can use the infer tags from filename command to recover those tags.
Last Edit: April 24, 2014, 03:00:42 PM by scampbll
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lnminente

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The first thing i would do is to sort all the library by the modification date, in detail view without grouping, and from there try to guess a pattern of what happenned and try to reverse it. Use also the tag inspector, analyse every tag there, if you used search and replace maybe numerical tags like year, release date, etc can be right and that could help to reduce the work involved.

Second, infer tags from filenames. Since now try to keep the path and filenames following a pattern like Album artist - Album name (year)\track number. (Artist -) track title

And of course from time to time, when there is some work involved, updade your backup.

Patience, and have luck (Y)

Stony_Curtis

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I have been going through the tags thoroughly, and noticed that the year tags seem to be unaltered (so far). I hadn't thought of looking at the modification dates as well; great idea!

Re: File names, I'm lucky in that regard. The files are named correctly and in the correct folder. The big issue there is the sheer volume of files. Although they're named correctly there isn't any real uniformity in the folder/file names. So even then, I'll have to go through each album individually.

The more I've dug into this, the uglier it's gotten. For example, I've found albums where the artist and album title are correct, but there could be as few as a single song with the wrong name. It seems so random. So essentially, I can't trust that ANY of the tags are correct, unless it's an album that I have the tracklist memorized. Although, now that you've suggested looking at the file modification dates, that could be a big help in that regard.

I do have pretty good backups, but those are all compressed files. I was hoping not to have to go that route, but it seems inevitable. So many passwords!

My plan at this point is to check those modification dates and seperate out the unmodified files. Then I'm going to use Picard to scan as much as possible. Then go to the compressed files. I'm still pretty bummed, considering how close I was to completion, but I'm no longer about to jump off a building. :)  I'll get there.

Thanks for your suggestions!