Author Topic: Starting over from a Google Music backup - auto-tagging issues  (Read 803 times)

vints

  • Newbie
  • *
  • Posts: 1
Hi Everyone,

I'm a complete newbie to MB so bear with me.  I did try to search the forums and troubleshoot on my own before coming to you.

A while back I lost all my music files.  Fortunately, I had backed up most of them to google a few years prior.  When I had finally downloaded everything, all my previous folder organization was lost and all I got was a mass of individual song files labeled only with the song name.  MB's auto-tagging features drew me to try it for organizing the new/old set of files.  Unfortunately, about 10% of the songs were unable to be found by either fpcalc or the built in tagger. Some songs without tags I would understand since I was hardly perfect in my previous organization, but in this case there are many songs that are the only song from a full album that was otherwise correctly identified and this one wasn't, often from well known artists.  Looking up the song titles online, it's easy to find the artists/albums, etc.  If there are any other options or suggestions that I can try other than going through the remaining 2k songs manually that would be helpful! 

In addition to this, I have found an older external hard drive backup of my music (~80% or so of what I backed up to google) that has retained the old folder organization.  I presume that these would give me more options for proper tagging as I can at least use the filename/path to infer tags. I'm tempted to copy that backup onto my machine and let MB go to town, but then I'm worried about properly dealing with the duplicate files.  I gather MB has ways to handle that, but it wasn't clear to me what exactly it can do and if this would be the best path forward.  The google backup is more recent so should contain everything in this backup.  If I can get that to tag things properly, I think that would be my preferred method.  But if duplicates are easier to handle than trying to tag the remaining stuff manually, then I'd go another way.

I haven't done anything to customize or optimize my library yet, so I could also start over with the external HD files and then try to add the stuff from google, if there is a way to ignore/remove duplicates.

Would appreciate any help or advice the more experienced users can share.
Thanks!
vints