Merge / Join Several Collections Best Practices

[Chrispy]

Can anybody give me tips on their process when merging artist/albums from different locations (i.e. another directory or even disk)?

My scenario: Three collections - Collection A is very clean and well organized (tagged with year, genre & album art, etc), Collection B is close (80%), and Collection C is not organized very well (needs to be run through Jaikoz).

On all three collections, I may have the same artists with same albums, but different quality (and I’d like to keep the best version). Or same artists with same/additional albums. Or completely new artists & albums that need to be merged in.

Biggest point: I want to merge Collections B & C into A, BUT if something matches A, always keep A.

I started manually doing all this and it was taking forever. I then tried the Save and Move (and Copy) from the “From” directory of artist/album/songs (after running them through an Autocorrect) but it wouldn’t merge into the applicable artist directory in the “To” location. I was hoping Jaikoz (or another tool) could automagically help me. Possible or am I doing something wrong? Thx

[Chrispy]

Hmm, bummer, I guess people haven’t had to merge libraries together? Nobody has found some old stuff (i.e. like my old iPod 60gb in my case) and want to merge the two together (along with some new albums I just got)?

My master library is just how I like it, with updated genres and album art (both which MB missed some and I had to clean up).

I now have the new stuff, which I’d like to merge in, basically just just merging the album into the artist folder. I tried the save & move (& copy) from http://www.jthink.net/jaikozforum/posts/list/1326.page but all it did was put the album in the other area at the artist folder level (not in an artist). Do I now run Duplicates per this thread http://www.jthink.net/jaikozforum/posts/list/6553.page? Sorry, that first thread was confusing on what actually to do or what he did. This will address my new stuff, of which I’m thinking 98% is not replacing anything old, but I’m afraid of the 2%, but can deal with it.

But, my main objective and what I’m really trying to do, is get this old iPod stuff into my main perfect library, BUT only move anything in there which is NOT already in there. Is it possible to “lock” my main library and move this other stuff in?

I know about locking down fields so MB doesn’t touch them (Preferences/Musicbrainz/Format and Preferences/Musicbrainz/Format 2 options) but can’t find any info on locking down files.

Would appreciate any help…thanks!

[paultaylor]

Hi, this is what I would do.

First it is going to be easier to identify duplicates if duplicate files have the same name so I would modify the Rename Folder from Metadata masks and Rename File from Metadata masks in Preferences:File and Folder Correct so they match how the files are named in Collection A and then run Action:File and Folder Correct:Correct Filename from Metadata and Correct SubFolder from Metadata to remove any inconsistenties. Jaikoz does inform iTunes when files are moved/renamed as long as Preferences:Save:iTunes AutoUpdate is enabled, but there is not the same integration with other players.

However if these files are under the control of iTunes you may not want to do this is if you have iTunes configured to Organize your media automatically because iTunes renames files according to their metadata and its metadata to filename mapping.

Then fix Collection B and select Preferences:Save:General:Move Folder to root of Collection A (i.e C:\Music) so they are put into same location and run File:Save and Move. If filenames conflict the new file would be labelled file(2).mp3 ecetera.

Then repeat for Collection C

Now if you load all your songs into Jaikoz and run Delete Duplicates Jaikoz should mark duplicates for deletion. I think you want the default setting in Preferences;Local Correct:Delete Duplicates which will mark it as a duplicate if matches two songs to the same track on the same Musicbrainz Release. You cannot get it to prefer the file originally in Collection A to Collection B, but it will always save the highest quality file, i.e it knows that Flac is a higher quality format than mp3, and that a 192 kbps mp3 is higher quality than a 128 kbps mp3.

You can use the filters in Filters/Delete Duplicates Filter and manually choose which file to Delete. However now I look at this I realize there is no filter on Musicbrainz Id and MB Release Id which is probably what you want. If you only filter on MB Recording Id then it will mark a track as a duplicate if the same track appears on two different albums.

But you’ll have to do the above procedure in batches because Jaikoz is memory bound, with default memory settings you are limited to about 20,000 files loaded at a time.

Hope this helps