Upgrading MP3 to FLAC in batches

[kairos]

Now that I have a NAS and a couple extra hundred megabytes per album seems fairly trivial, I'm looking to slowly rerip my CD collection to FLAC instead of MP3 as I have it now. But what I'd like to know is whether or not there's a convenient way to upgrade the files in MusicBee while keeping metadata intact, on an album-by-album basis? I found the option to replace any single song with the new FLAC file (right click -> Send To -> Folder (Replace) -> Use the selected file to replace another file), but doing that for all of the tracks of even one album one-by-one was pretty tedious and I really don't want to do another several dozen albums like that. Is there a way to replace all of the tracks of an album with an upgraded file in one go?

[rg_gapa]

Are there any informations not stored in mp3 tags, but in MusicBee library itself? If you think about moving tags from hundreds or thousands of files to a new one I would suggest Mp3Tag application - you might copy-paste tags in batch here, just order them in the same way and make sure you have all files at both sides - to copy and to paste to.

[kairos]

Mostly I'm wanting to preserve ratings, play counts, and the "date added" and "last played" fields, because I use all of those for smart playlists.

[frankz]

I wish you could.

If this is functionality you want, you should "+1" this wishlist item.  Wishlist items with a lot of interest are generally given more consideration than those with little interest.

[kairos]

It's hacky and ugly and a bit error-prone, but the best workflow I've figured out for this task is to prepare your FLACs somewhere else, then convert the MP3s in MusicBee's library to FLAC with the built-in format conversion tool, then replace those bad lossy FLACs with the ones you prepared earlier from Windows Explorer. This seems to accomplish what I want with the least amount of time and repetitive stress injury. Make backups of everything first.

[alec.tron]

Also, as is in my experience, Musicbee will only copy tags it 'knows' about, i.e. which you have configured explicitly... and in my case, there's a fair few that I do not care much about to be shown in Musicbee, so I never configured them, but I do care about the tags when transferring data from one to the other...

So I still use foobar for this, as it does copy all existing tags between file formats more elegantly... but it requires a bit of hand-holding to do so as well, see:
http://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=Foobar2000:How_to_transfer_tags_between_two_sets_of_tracks

c.

[theta_wave]

Use Additional tagging and reporting tools: https://getmusicbee.com/forum/index.php?topic=3833.0

It allows you to copy all the metadata from one format to another (including date added, etc).  I use this all of the when replacing my MP3s with FLACs.  I have to say that your thread title made me cast a sideways glance towards your direction since to me it implies you transcoded MP3s to FLACs.

My workflow:

MP3s are in the library
FLACs are in the inbox

Using the plugin, I copy the desired metadata from MP3s (for myself, they are ratings, Last.fm love, playcounts, date added and all of the custom fields I made) and paste them to FLACs.  Then I delete the MP3s and import the FLACs to the library.

[wombleywoo]

If anyone is interested, I have created a crowdfunding campaign to pay a developer to make a plugin which automates this process!

https://gofund.me/38c41b2e