Old music files and empty folders

[finfan313]

I have been using musicbee for quite a few years now. I have changed computers probably three times in the number of years I've been using musicbee. But here's my problem I have ended up with many many broken files and empty folders. Any thoughts about how to get rid of those so my player can just go through my library with music that works. This is such a mess and trying to do it by hand one of the time is crazy because I have thousands of pieces of music on my player. Note please. If you give me an answer try to keep it as simple as possible meaning the terminology because computers are not my forte. Thanks in advance, Pamela

[hiccup]

Empty folders should not be a real problem for MusicBee, because, they are empty and contain no files that could interfere with anything.
If you want to get rid of them, there are many 3rd party tools that can find and remove them for you.
(This is one I have used in the past: https://sourceforge.net/projects/rem-empty-dir/ )

What do you mean with 'broken files' exactly?

[finfan313]

Hey thanks so much for your response. I'm not sure I'm using the right terminology when I say broken files. It seems some of the files will have parts of the music that skips around like maybe it's a corrupted file. Maybe it got that way from me moving things from one computer to the other I'm not sure. Some of the same songs will play great while another will not. Indicating of course that there are duplicates  which  I'm trying to get rid of also but I only want to get rid of the bad ones not the good one . There were also files with numbers in front of them that I did not recognize. I don't know if maybe these were Amazon music player files because a lot of times I download music from Amazon onto the Amazon player. And there were just hundreds of files that had these weird numbers and letters and my computer said there was no way to play those files whether it was in musicbee or groovy music

[hiccup]

And there were just hundreds of files that had these weird numbers and letters and my computer said there was no way to play those files whether it was in musicbee or groovy music

I don't know much about Amazon music, but could it be they are protected (encrypted) files that only work with Amazon stuff?
Do these files have an audio extension such as .mp3 .flac .ogg .m4a etc?

[finfan313]

I use my Amazon files on the music bee player all the time. It's just that I happened to notice that when I was moving files from one computer onto an external hard drive and then moving it to my new computer and new music be player that there were a lot of strange looking files that had to be deleted. It seems like a lot of them were from the Amazon songs that I downloaded from the Amazon player. But other files from Amazon player work just like they always have. I'm going to try and find an example of what the files have on them. Thanks again for your response

[finfan313]

Okay well I have a few files here that I will use as an example.
I have several songs in a row that have  UTC after the information. Stuff for example the first song I'm looking at is Living on a Prayer in (it has 2020_02_22 15 27_53  UTC this particular piece has no sound whatsoever. The next listing has the same numbers with the UTC but it says that unable to play this file it has an unsupported format or is corrupted. So the living on the prayer song looks like it's playing but there is no sound the next song says corrupted file and yet another one that looks just like it plays but it is very glitchy. I am totally confused

[hiccup]

I have several songs in a row that have  UTC after the information. Stuff for example the first song I'm looking at is Living on a Prayer in (it has 2020_02_22 15 27_53  UTC

Do you know what file extension are?

filename.mp3
is an mp3 audio file.

filename.flac
is a flac audio file.

filename.jpg
is a jpg image file

etc. etc.

Do the problematic files have such extensions?
(you may need to enable Windows displaying file extensions to see them)

[finfan313]

I am learning a lot here. The file extension says it's a m4a. I don't know what that kind of file is

[finfan313]

I can also see that the file is in multiple file history locations. I was trying to get rid of all those different extensions if that's what they're called and just have them in one music folder but I don't know how to do that. Thanks again for all your responses. Pamela

[finfan313]

From what I am seeing is this was part of an iTunes library sometime back. I hated iTunes then and I hate iTunes Now. And it's causing me problems even though I got rid of all those files a long time ago or so I thought. It looks as if I do a converter then the files will work. Does that make sense to you? Thanks again

[hiccup]

It's hard to be sure from a distance, but it looks like your problems are a mix of duplicates, corrupted files, perhaps protected iTunes files, I am not sure.
I think for now you are taking good first steps in figuring out what's what.

If Amazon or iTunes files pose specific issues, I don't know much about those.
Converting file formats can sometimes help in the sense that the converter will rewrite a file (it's metadata) with a clean slate.
(but if the audio stream itself is corrupted it will not solve that)
Also understand that converting from a lossy format to another lossy format will affect the sound quality and diminish it.


Duplicate music files could (to a limited extend) be handled by MusicBee, but there are also 3rd party tools that can help in finding possible duplicate files on your drives.

Corrupted files will be much more difficult to determine. But crazy filenames and extensions will surely make them suspects.

If your old iTunes and Amazon files are valuable to you, try to backup everything you have on a separate drive first.
Then you can always have a second try when things go wrong.

Maybe other members can relate to the issues as described and contribute with some other suggestions?

[finfan313]

Thank you so much for your time. So the link that you posted earlier is a good program to use for getting rid of duplicate and corrupted files? I think you've helped me a lot but I also think that this is so huge I might not be able to get it just right but I might be able to get it to where it works well. Thanks again for your time

[hiccup]

So the link that you posted earlier is a good program to use for getting rid of duplicate and corrupted files?

No, that one is for finding and deleting empty folders.
(it has other features as well)

Finding and defining duplicate files is a much more complicated matter.

You could create a specific topic for that in the 'Beyond MusicBee' board.
(but first check if there already isn't one. And/or do a good forum/web search on it, the matter has come up before for sure)

[frankz]

If it was me and everything was so screwed up, I would...

1. Make sure I was able to download all of the screwed up files from the original source at this time (iToon or Amazon).

1a. Double check that my information in step 1 is correct

2. Delete every copy  of the problem files

3. Download fresh copies of the files

Why even bother with hosed out files? Amazon and iToon let you download your purchases additional times I'm sure.

[finfan313]

I think that's exactly what I need to do. A lot of what I have on my computer is from CDs that I have ripped to the computer so the amount of work that that takes is Extreme. Because my music selection or Library rather is so huge I feel like I am going to delete old files that are suspicious and redownload what I can. It's a mix of the old and the new way it was a lot easier when it was just LP LOL thanks guys I appreciate it. Pamela