Update on my process.
I'm working on the "Js" in my list of studio albums, and the process is so much better than when I was running them through the Discogs plugin in Media Monkey. I regret all the time I wasted doing that. I'll go a step further, and say that I really regret all the time I wasted using Media Monkey as a tag manager. To be fair, my tags are more consistent than I realized, at least in the Studio album section of my library. I can credit some of that to Discogs.
So, here's what I'm doing;
1. I'm selecting artists in the file structure in the left pane based on how many tracks I have by that artist as shown in MusicBee. Artists that have well over a hundred are processed separately.
2. Keeping the total tracks processed at a time to under a thousand, I drag them to the "Unmatched Files" section, and let them process.
3. When the albums are all loaded, I select all in the left pane, and drag them back to the "Unmatched Files" section, and "Cluster."
4. With the files all clustered, I do a "Lookup."
5. Go through all the results, and delete the albums that have zero tracks listed, and make sure that all of them are "Gold."
6. "Expand all" and scroll through the entire list and check out all the tracks that are dark red.
7. "Collapse all" and scroll through each label to make sure I like the cover art.
8. "Select all" and add them to my processed collection, and then save.
As I go, I'm finding some troublesome albums that don't seem to fit. I'll make a quick effort to fix it. If I can't, I create a shortcut to the folder in a "difficult" folder. Once I'm done with the first pass, I'm going back to see what I need to do to make them work. This is where I will add them to the MusicBrainz database.
I did have to keep MusicBrainz from modifying the Album Artist. I have several Album Artists that I change to be more generic, for example; Frankie Valli. I really don't want to care if he had the Four Seasons with him or not when I'm looking for a track he did. I was going to try to code that in, but I already had it in place in the Album Artist tags in my files, so why would I needlessly over-complicate it?
In all, I'm happy with the results of my little experiment. I've only played a little bit with auto-playlists on my processed tracks, and the results seem better. Not much difference in my browsing, but that just tells me I had done a pretty good job before. Nothing has jumped out as being outright wrongly titled, so I've got that going for me. Which is nice. I would definitely encourage anyone on the fence to just jump in. The learning curve is there, but it's nowhere nearly as bad as I had thought. Next time through will be way faster now that I have acoustids, and MusicBrainz info embedded.
So thanks for listening, and thanks for the encouragement. I wouldn't have done it without you.
Rock On!
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