Author Topic: allow using a virtual tag as discriminator for the Duplicates Manager  (Read 817 times)

hiccup

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The reasoning:

I am using a single custom tag that contains all the MusicBrainz IDs (Album Artist, Artist, Recording, Work, etc.) in a concatenated format that gets populated when I run a song/album through Picard.
(there are quite a few types of MusicBrainz IDs, so having (sacrificing) a custom tag for each one of them is not an option.

Then to be able to make further use of them I have setup a couple of virtual tags.
(one will have the 'album artist id', another one the 'artist id', another the 'release group id', etc. etc.)

One of them is absolutely ideal and perfect to know if any track is identical to another one:
It's the MusicBrainz 'recording' ID.

But since the Duplicates Manager does not allow to use virtual tags, I can't use it to find tracks that are without any doubt duplicates.

Being able to use this virtual tag for me (but I am guessing for some other users too) would be the only 100% reliable way to find actual duplicates.





hiccup

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I tested this using only my virtual tag for MusicBrainz' recording ID and unchecking any other tag.
(title, artist etc. don't matter anymore in this case)
Unless I am using the duplicate manager wrong (I've not used it much before), it looks like not only tracks with identical MusicBrainz IDs are marked as duplicates, but also all the files that have no value for that tag are marked as being duplicates. Which obviously presents many incorrect results.

If that is indeed what is happening, it would be good if the duplicate manager would only check files that have a value for the virtual tag that is used for this purpose.
Last Edit: June 27, 2022, 06:19:47 PM by hiccup

Steven

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you could run a custom query to filter out the blank ones, and the run the duplicates manager on the remaining files