Duplicates & .asx files

[Steven]

the removed files should be in the recycle bin if its a local drive and if the recycle bin is full then a utility like Recuva can be used to recover deleted files

[phred]

I'm not so sure MB converted the files. There is no .asx file converter option in MB preference. The option to include one does not exist.

Sorry phred, but the Duplicates Manager does have the ability to convert extra files to the ASX format.

That's what the "replace with reference to the kept file" option does.
It creates an ASX file that links to the kept file, but keeps all the tags from the other file.  So if you have a file that is same for a single, album and anthology box set, you only have to keep the one file to play, but the different info for the other versions are kept in the .asx file and used by MB when played.

Ahhh ... good to know. Thanks Bee-liever. And my apologies to the OP.

[kidjedi]

@ kidjedi
Without knowing what settings you were using to filter your duplicates, its hard to know what went wrong.  As you can see from the image i posted, MB is showing 2 versions of Sweet Dreams, but they are not really duplicates.  If you could hover over the path you would see that one is a live version and the other is the original album version.  These are only showing as I deliberately only used title to search for duplicates.
As for your original files before being converted to ASX, I think that MB does permanently delete them.  Check one of those ASX files, and you may just have to edit the path to the kept file.

Since I was just testing the Duplicate Manager's abilities, I just left the settings it defaulted to selected (title and artist), but I thought I was "being safe" and just dipping my toe in the water by only asking MusicBee to alter three files... luckily MusicBee seems to have choked on the number of duplicates (even though they were not marked for deletion) and crashed after the first 2,000 files.  Not only that, but MusicBee deleted ALL files for every song and NO file was left to which the new ASX reference was pointing.  To reiterate, this means the ASX files do no good (they are pointing to nothing). This is a significant problem that really needs to be checked at the code level.

It would be great if there was an option to have MB Duplicate Manager place files marked for deletion in a repository folder (a safety) instead of just deleting them.  You can theoretically recover from the recycle bin if your files are on a hard drive physically attached to the computer you are using, but for those people using NAS (a media server), deletions are permanent.  And I would think at this point in time there would be quite a few people using networked drives.

I suppose it is possible that the ASX files point to nothing because MusicBee crashed before the process was completed, but this means that actual music files are deleted before the ASX files have anywhere to point, and this process order should be rectified in the code.

I could see someone (someone who doesn't back up their media library), permanently losing a LOT of music files as a result of this.

[kidjedi]

the removed files should be in the recycle bin if its a local drive and if the recycle bin is full then a utility like Recuva can be used to recover deleted files

Right, but as mentioned in an earlier post, I'm accessing my media files from a NAS.  I have a mapped drive set up on the machine running MusicBee so that MusicBee plays nice, but unfortunately that doesn't help with the recycle bin issue.  Recova only works on physically attached drives.

It would be great if the Duplicate Manager had an option to place files marked for deletion in a safety folder for those people who are accessing their music across a network (which I would think is a LOT of people these days).  MusicBee is a fantastic and powerful tool, but as such, it can also do a lot of damage to one's media library.  i think some sort of "marked for deletion" repository could really be useful in many instances.

"Luckily" I know which files are missing, because in place of the original MP3 or FLAC is an ASX file.  If these deletions had been made via some other process, it's possible that the files would just be gone.  There would be other ways to determine what was missing (reviewing the actual text in the MB database or running a search for broken links from within MB... though at that point I'd be reticent to keep messing with my files from within MusicBee), but obviously it would be nice to just avoid the issue in the first place.

[Steven]

i am going to make 2 changes for this functionality
- enforce title as part of the duplicate matching criteria
- prompt with the number of files that will be deleted on the confirmation dialog

[kidjedi]

i am going to make 2 changes for this functionality
- enforce title as part of the duplicate matching criteria
- prompt with the number of files that will be deleted on the confirmation dialog

Cool.  I was going to suggest a delete confirmation, but was only thinking about having to do that for each and every file (obviously not feasible when working with a lot of files).  Great idea to simply have the user confirm number of files being deleted.