Merging Folders and then Files

[dmacfady]

I have a very large and multilingual collection of East European music (numerous alphabets, diacritics, etc). My problem concerns the finding and deletion of duplicates. The music is archived as follows.

The overwhelming number of recordings are EPs, LPs, etc—not individual “singles” or lone MP3s lacking artwork. This means that almost every release is in a folder, containing both the MP3s/FLACs/WAVs, whatever - and the artwork as a JPG or PNG file. Those multiple folders were once collected on individual hard drives, which in turn were then transferred to a single multi-rack NAS server (offline), which is where they currently sit.

So the entire collection (2M+ files) consists of maybe 30 folders, each representing an older external HD, and each of those HD folders contains very many sub folders (each holds an LP, EP, etc,…).

GOAL ONE/MERGE — What I want to do is find duplicate LP folders within those many HD folders, and whenever there are duplicates to merge them all, not delete anything this first stage.
GOAL TWO/TIDY UP — However, if/when the mergers are done, what is the best way to deal with the “inferior” folders that were merged into something else and are no longer useful? Can this be automated?

Can this be done with SongKong? I’ve used it for a long time and hope it can handle this new and bigger challenge…

Thanks!
David

[paultaylor]

@dmacfady

GOAL ONE/MERGE — What I want to do is find duplicate LP folders within those many HD folders, and whenever there are duplicates to merge them all, not delete anything this first stage.

Hi, yes it can be done, you just need to work with the way SongKong works. The merger idea doesn’t really work but you can achieve your ultimate goal without merging.

The Delete Duplicates task can find duplicate albums, by finding songs on duplicate albums based on the MusicBrainz Release Ids. You need to select an option from Song is a duplicate if has same that includes same album, and you need to decide if two different versions of the same album constitute a
duplicate album or not.

But Delete Duplicates works by reading the MusicBrainz metadata from the files, so this means they must already have been identified by Fix Songs before you run Delete Duplicates, so you need to have run Fix Songs first.

Now when you run Delete Duplicates you could either run in Preview Mode first, check the results and then run again without preview. Or you could run with When you have a duplicate songs set to Move duplicate to Duplicates folder rather than Delete Duplicate

but this leads to your second question, how do you deal with the inferior folders ?

This is the purpose of the Advanced tab, when multiple duplicates files are found they are checked for the criteria listed in Preferred Deletion Criteria in order until a difference is found, once a difference is found the inferior file(s) are the ones deleted.

The most useful criteria is probably Audio Format, for example if one file is mp3 and one file is flac then by default the mp3 will always be deleted, because it is lower down in the Preferred Audio Format list

Another example is the Bit Depth criteria, this ensures HD files (24bit) are kept in preference to usual CD quality (16-bit) files.

[dmacfady]

Thank you so much, and I am sure many people will benefit from this answer.

My situation adds a level of complication in that these are (with rare exception) neither commercial nor English-language releases, so when using SongKong, I have found that 90%+ of the discoveries or successful IDs by SongKong come from Discogs. (In fact, the richness of Discogs’ info for East European material has been a v pleasant surprise.)

So if your Duplicates functionality relies on MusicBrainz declaring two compositions as identical, how might identical albums/EPs, etc. be located in my situation? I would imagine this complication holds true for many folks working outside the English language.

[paultaylor]

@dmacfady

so when using SongKong, I have found that 90%+ of the discoveries or successful IDs by SongKong come from Discogs

Okay well that is a problem, but I expect its not as high a percentage as that.

This is what I suggest:

1. Follow my steps to find duplicate albums where you have MusicBrainz duplicates.
2. Then rerun Delete Duplicates but in Preview mode with Song is a duplicate if has same set to
   Same Song and same album (metadata only), this finds duplicates based on matching artist, titles and album titles. This way is not as accurate but still works most of the time and can make use of the metadata added by Discogs, by running in preview mode first you can check the results.

[dmacfady]

This is extremely useful, especially for Mac users and people working outside the English language