Preparation before installing Music Bee

[Alex M]

My question is how to prepare the Music files & folders on my hard drive before installing Music Bee.

On my hard drive, I have created categories (= sub-folders) like World Music / Classic / Jazz / Kletzmer / etc...
The CDs copies are stored under their relevant categories.

It seems that Music Bee file organiser is confused with these categories because they modify the path to the files.
The path is different according to the category type.

For some categoris I widh to create sub-sub categories. For instance I could create different region or country for the world music. I could also create different conductors for Classic music.

Should I leave all the CDs unorganised on the hard drive?
This kind of information is missing in the wiki.

Regards,
Alex M.

[hiccup]

Welcome to the forum Alex M.

In principle it is not very relevant how you choose to have your folder organisation on your drives, and there is no common 'best practice' for that. (other than that if you have decided on a folder structure and workflow, it is probably wise to stick to it and try to be consistent)
Everybody will have his/her own preferences in doing that.

In theory you could pile up all your music files in one big folder. (if all files are tagged well, that is)
It's the metadata (tagging) that will define how your collection will be presented and handled in MusicBee.

I don't understand what you say here:

It seems that Music Bee file organiser is confused with these categories because they modify the path to the files.
The path is different according to the category type.

It could be the wording you are using what's confusing me, or perhaps you have already set up some auto-organisation in MusicBee by yourself?
By default MB will not change folders, paths, etc.

[Alex M]

Thank you hiccup for your help.
And thank you to Steven Mayall for developping this great tool for free...

I understand from you that it's the tagging which provides the info displayed in File Organizer.

Under the column "New filename", I can see many "Unknown Album Artist" while the name is clearly indicated in the sub-folder/file name.
But I understand now that folder/file name doesn't play any role.

Still I believe that a Getting Started tutorial is missing (the page named Getting Started simply describes the interface).



Regards,

Alex M.

[hiccup]

I think I now understand better what the possible issue is you are addressing here:
Suppose that you have folders on your drives that contain tracks that have no, wrong, or inconsistent tags. (especially Artist, Title, Album, Album Artist)
What will happen if you have those folders and it's tracks first scanned by MusicBee, and how will you be able to fix problems there?

That is a very good question, but one that I never encounter.
Why? Because I have a workflow where I first use other software (Tag&Rename, I think others often use MP3Tag), to prepare the tracks in a (new) folder before they get into MusicBee.
The reason for me in using 3d party software for that is because with those you are able to right-click on a folder, and quickly view and edit only the contents of that folder. So after having done a quick prepare in that manner, I hardly ever encounter issues with incorrect basic artist, title, album tags.
By the way, I think that if a new track has no tags at all, MusicBee will look at the filename to try and present it's 'artist' and 'title'. But that is of course prone to incorrect results with non-standard and/or incorrect file names.

So your question would better be answered by somebody who has experience in using MusicBee also for first identification and correcting problems there.

I can think of some solutions, but I think it is better that we first see if some MusicBee user who is experienced with this, and has a nicely working workflow for this responds here.

(I was not even aware of a MusicBee 'File Organiser' feature to be honest)