Author Topic: Re-Locate missing files for whole albums / multi files  (Read 16235 times)

alec.tron

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Heya,
as mentioned in this solved feature wish:
http://getmusicbee.com/forum/index.php?topic=19793.msg118526#msg118526

it would be great if the re-locate function would also work in an album context. Ideally with an additional user defined identifier (although track numbering/alphabetical order should be pretty reliable in a majority of cases...(?) ) in case it was re-located and renamed at the same time...).
Cheers.
c.

alec.tron

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Hm, no one else wanting/needing to re-locate whole albums ?
File by file is quite time-consuming... and it's just a matter of fact that in our vast digital libraries things do change location/name/or both occasionally...
Or does anyone have a good trick for doing a relocate on multiple-files pointing to a new location to look in and do a match by parameter (i.e. alphabetical sorting, wild card from the original name, etc ) ?
Cheers.
c.



rudolph

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I found a fix... - Use listFix() software to fix .m3u missing song links.

alec.tron

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Thanks for the headsup.
But urgh for Java Runtime requirement... might try it on an old laptop.
Did it work well in your case ?
Churs.
c.

Steven

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just bumping this as i plan to have a look at something that helps with locating multiple missing files

alec.tron

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Thanks Steven!

Could you please consider making the 'relocate file' functionality accessible actively as well through the GUI/hotkey/right-click-menu so one can swap files in a single playlists and/or all playlists globally (without having to delete the one I want to replace first to get to the 'replace file' dialogue).
That'd be swish.
i.e. this:
http://getmusicbee.com/forum/index.php?topic=20189.msg120134#msg120134

Cheers.
c.
Last Edit: March 19, 2017, 11:36:54 PM by alec.tron

Steven

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http://musicbee.niblseed.com/V3_1/MusicBee31_Patched.zip

A new main menu command has been added Tools/ Locate Missing Files
- for the files displayed in the main panel, this function will check every file to make sure they still exist at the expected location
- if any missing files are detected, they will be displayed in a grid
- in the background MB will attempt to locate the missing files matching on filename, artist/title or file size
- you can also manually select a file and MB will also attempt to match other files from that folder

alec.tron

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Awesome, looking forward to try this tonight!

So many questions though...
When you say "for the files displayed in the main panel" - is this true for (main) Library panel as well as Playlist panels (which can hold files that are NOT in the library) ?
And (I will need to test this to get a clearer picture of the functionality) is there means for a user to have more control over the " in the background MB will attempt to locate the missing files" functionality to trigger replace for a whole set of file (i.e. an album) via a GUI to double check/tweak the suggested matching files before actually applying them ?

Churs.
c.

alec.tron

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Heya,
just got home and gave this a try, and in case you'd want some feedback (this is just based on my first few attempts - and I changed my naming patterns for files quite extremely over the years... so the only constant & reliable matching patter is quite often the order/ ## or #_## in the filename [usually in the beginning...] - so this is all highly subjective to my case):

- after 2-8 minutes of searching through the complete library for each attempt, the auto matching was wrong 5 out of 5 times unfortunately. And, even more bizarrely, in 3 of the 5 cases (for a full file selection from different albums) it also found the exact same wrong file and suggested it for each entry, i.e. the matching suggestion looked like this:

Code
01 Ode.mp3              |          |     02 ~ salud.mp3
02 Some.mp3             |          |     02 ~ salud.mp3
03 Circling.mp3         |          |     02 ~ salud.mp3
- the [...] button interrupt, by pointing to one of the album files, did not stop the auto search, but seemingly continued to trawl the filesystem if the user suggested location did not yield a match

- that all feels like the current implementation is probably mostly useful for files, with the same name that have been moved to a different path/location (which is rarely the case for me... as - if files move location, I usually take advantage of that and update the file naming pattern at the same time to the latest & greatest (as I need to rebuild other databases (Serato/Traktor that rely on them too... ) so in order to do the 2 birds with one stone, I do both in one go...)


A few suggestions, in case that's wanted/helpful:
- I would prefer a more manual way as I usually know where things have moved to & trawling the whole library takes a fair bit of time
- I would love to be able to define a matching pattern (especially when helping the match along and pointing to a specific folder where to look for the new files - eg the user should be able to decide on what basis matching happens; either by full file name, or a user defined sub string inside the file name, or even simply by order / by digits/track# in the user suggested target folder).

Churs.
c.

Steven

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- after 2-8 minutes of searching through the complete library for each attempt, the auto matching was wrong 5 out of 5 times unfortunately. And, even more bizarrely, in 3 of the 5 cases (for a full file selection from different albums) it also found the exact same wrong file and suggested it for each entry, i.e. the matching suggestion looked like this:

Code
01 Ode.mp3              |          |     02 ~ salud.mp3
02 Some.mp3             |          |     02 ~ salud.mp3
03 Circling.mp3         |          |     02 ~ salud.mp3
- the [...] button interrupt, by pointing to one of the album files, did not stop the auto search, but seemingly continued to trawl the filesystem if the user suggested location did not yield a match
I will change the behavior so the Auto-matching is initiated from a button click.
However the matching should be reasonably accurate, using the following in order:
1: filename
2: file size
3: artist and title tags

i guess the files in question had the same file size. I will make it a bit stricter by making 2 and 3 compulsory for a match to happen


alec.tron

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Heya.
I just tried the new patch, and this time 3 out of 3 attempts didn't yield any results at all. Maybe I'm approaching this wrong / from an unintended angle, so to confirm:
- I run these on playlists that have missing files.
- only 1 album at a time
- first 'Start Auto-Match' search of the day (after starting MB) takes a few minutes
- consecutive 'Start Auto-Match' searches after the first  are much faster than the first search (does it do some caching now ?)

Unfortunately, among the 3 I tested I was certain it should/would find 2 of them at least, but have a look :

1: filename
see screenshot part 3 - despite the exact same name in playlist and library, it has not found the file althoigh the file in the new location is in the library as well (which is not a given in the way I use playlists... i.e. demos etc I might not add to my library, but they might exist in a playlist... and they might continue to live outside the library or get deleted at some later point in time, after which I still want the dead entry in a playlist to stick around for archival purposes...)

2: file size
see screenshot part 2- it seems to query the missing file for size ? Or how come it's displaying 'original size=0'... ?!

3: artist and title tags
see screenshot part 1 - it seems to get the 'title' from the dead-entry's title field, which when a file missing, this is making title = fileName, which makes a match impossible...?





Additionally, I'm not sure what else I could try as even in example 3, when pointing it to the new folder by hand with the exact same filenames, it does not recognize them as the same either... and these are all fairly easy cases (which is unusual for my playlists & library setup as I slowly replace old mp3 rips of my CDs & vinyl with flac rips of the same - but when doing so fileName & fileSize is nearly always different), and on these examples, matching should have been fairly easy with the rule-set you outlined, right ?
It all smells as if MB is expecting to have more data at it's disposal to do the match... any idea what might be wrong in my attempt to use this ?


Churs.
c.
Last Edit: April 06, 2017, 01:47:30 PM by alec.tron

Steven

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i expect what is happening is you have imported playlists where the referenced file doesnt exist and hence the only thing MB knows about the file is the filename. I will make a further tweak to the matching so that in that case, MB only attempts to match on filename and not artist/title and file size