Importing a library with mostly duplicates of existing media files

[SoundChaser]

Hello,

I’m back at cleaning the media library backups in my father-in-law disks. This had been postponed for the summer, but I’d like to get this over with by end of year (hopefully, haha!)

I’ve got about half of the library identified, tagged and cleaned by SongKong. Wonderful. Duplicates were sorted out as well. I’ve got the other stuff to go through; I’ve had limited success with Picard so I’ll give Jaikoz a shot, but later.

Today I just found another copy of the library with perhaps some extra files. I wonder if there’s a way to do a three-way merge through SongKong à-la:

• here’s the destination library, scan it.
• here’s a source library, scan it.
• Songkong, if you find anything in the source library that’s acoustically a duplicate from something in the destination library, move it to “ignored as duplicates” folder
• move everything else in the destination library, using the origin hierarchy

All this with a dry-run mode, of course!

Otherwise I guess I could restart from start and merge all copies into one with rsync or something simlar.

Someone here may have gone through such workflow? Any advice?

Thanks a bunch
-François

[paultaylor]

This is how I would do it.

1. Run Fix Songs on new source library, ensure Force Acoustic fingerprint even if already matched is enabled (because these are needed to acoustically find duplicates in Delete Duplicates, and currently Delete Duplicates doesn’t create the fingerprint if missing), and dont rename or move files.
   

2. Now run Delete Duplicates on both source and destination in preview mode (you can select multiple locations from different drives - Can I select Multiple folders from different drives)

3. Look at results, has it found duplicates and is it deleting the correct one you may need to adjust Preferred Deletion Criteria on the Advanced tab so that the correct one is deleted (possibly can make use of File Creation Date or File Modified Date)
   

   

4. When happy run again without preview.

5. Now src folder should mostly contain only songs that are not already in destination folder, so you could now run Fix Songs again with Move Folder set to destination folder to merge the two libraries.

Notes:

Of course if you are using MusicBrainz Ids as well as Acoustids to find Delete Duplicates (which is recommended) e.g. Same MusicBrainz Song and Sounds the Same then Delete Duplicates can only find duplicates if songs are matched to MusicBrainz therefore there may be duplicates still existing within the songs that were not matched to MusicBrainz.

You could just use Sounds the same only but then this will allow deletion of the same song on different albums which is probably not what you want, therefore would be best to just as run in Preview to help find any potentials duplicates that could then be manually deleted.

[SoundChaser]

Thank you ! I’ll give that a shot today !