Questions on Deleting Duplicates on Melco

[Lancelot]

Dear Paul,

per your request I am reposting my question again here:
As a newbee to SongKong I would like to learn more about a few specific tasks I feel are needed to clean up my Melco Music Library. After importing of flac files from an USB drive I have found many duplicate entries, missing album covers or complicated folder structures I would rather get rid of.

Leveraging SongKong, what is the best way toachieve the following:

1. Remove folders of flac files from my Melco ?

2. Identify and remove duplicate songs ? (i.e. what setting would I choose to achieve this?)

3. Find and add missing album covers or replace album covers?

Are there instructionals or (video) tutorials on how to do this each of the above?

I don’t think I understand how to best use the tool yet. E.g., when I tried to remove duplicate files from a specific album, only half of the duplicates where identified and removed with the seting I had chosen.

Thank you very much for any insights you can offer.

Kind regards,

Reinhard

[paultaylor]

You don’t say what options you have used but most of the Delete Duplicates options work better if the songs have been identified by SongKong first using the Fix Songs task, and and finding album covers is also part of the Fix Songs task. So I would run Fix Songs over your whole collection, taking care of the options to decide if you want to correct existing metadata or only add metadata when missing, there are some predefined profiles that help with this.

Then after doing that run Delete Duplicates. By enabling the When find duplicates delete folder and any sub folders if empty or only contains the following files option you can delete folders that are now empty once duplicates removed.

We have a few videos but they are rather old

But the web tutorial is new and covers all aspects of SongKong

[Lancelot]

Thanks for this. In your screen shot I cannot see the option chosen to delete duplicate songs. Which one works best for this?
Also how would I move songs from a misspelled folder to the main folder for that artist and delete the misspelled folder later ob?

[paultaylor]

@Lancelot

Thanks for this. In your screen shot I cannot see the option chosen to delete duplicate songs. Which one works best for this?

That is the Preferred Deletion Criteria, Keep Song that Matches Criteria on the Advanced tab

When multiple songs are found that seem to be the same it checks the first criteria and if their is a difference between the songs it picks the one that best matches the preferred criteria, e.g. keeps the one with the Highest Bit Depth, if there is no difference it checks the next criteria and so on. The default order works best for most users but it depends on your own individual circumstances.

@Lancelot

Also how would I move songs from a misspelled folder to the main folder for that artist and delete the misspelled folder later ob?

This would be done by the Rename Files task, this renames the files based on their metadata, and would automatically delete a folder if it became empty .

But you should run Fix Songs first if you haven’t already done so.

[Lancelot]

I find it quite hard to get any songs or folders deleted at all, even though I ran fix songs first. For example: I have imported an album with higher audio quality via my CD drive. Now I have the album show up twice in my Linn app as I already had one Version in my music library. Running the delete duplicate songs task does not find any duplicates as one is sitting in the import CD directory and the other in the import directory which is hosting my music library. How do I get the import CD directory integrated into the main music library? Is there a simple feature that allows shifting and deleting folders as easy and intuitive as in MS Explorer?

[paultaylor]

You can select multiple drives to run SongKong against, bit trickier with webui then desktop ui but just need to put each one in double quotes separated by a space, see screenshot in this link Can I select Multiple folders from different drives

If you just want to move folders you can do that by remote mounting your melco drive on your PC and using Windows Explorer, there would be little point adding this feature to SongKong.

[paultaylor]

Actually there is another way, use the Rename Files task and the Move Matched and Move Unmatched options to change the base folder of the files from CDImport folder to Import Folder see Tutorial: Rename Files, Moving

[Lancelot]

My issue is bit different: I have imported two CDs which were loaded into the Import_CD library of my Melco N1Z. However, I already had these CD‘s in the Music Library folder of the Melco. Now I show duplicate folders with the CD’s (one being a Deluxe Version, the the other an SACD version) under the artist name in Minim server. They are both on the same hard drive, but in different section of the folder structure. I have not been able so far to get rid of the duplicates using the remove duplicates task. How would I go about doing that?

[paultaylor]

So to be clear you have two copies of two albums?

First step, can you run Create Support Files then I can see more clearly the situation and what you have tried to do.

[paultaylor]

Without the support files I am just guessing what the issue is because I don’t know what metadata you have in your files or what you have done.

[Lancelot]

I am simply showing two albums „Slowhand“ in my Eric Clapton folder with different covers and the same songs in esch album folder. One of them seems to sit in the CD import section, the other in the main music library section of my Melco. The same is true for a second Clapton album. I only wanted to keep one of each - the one with the better sound quality.
By the way, I have just created the support files. Does this tell you more about the issue?

[paultaylor]

Hi so when you run Create Supports it only uploads the last 5 reports of each type

1. I couldn’t see a Fix Songs or Status Report for the Eric Clapton folder, I don’t know if you ran Fix Songs against the files previously but could you please run one of these so I can then see the files in the folders and the metadata in the files

2. I can see you have run Delete Duplicates on /mnt/disk1/share/import/all/Musikbibliothek/Eric Clapton and it found no duplicates.

But from what you are saying it appears that /mnt/disk1/share/import/all/Musikbibliothek/Eric Clapton only contains one copy of the album, and the other album is in a different folder?

If that is the case then clearly Delete Duplicates will not find a duplicate because the folder you are checking does not contain any duplicates !

You can get round this by either:

1. Running Delete Duplicates against complete disk

e.g /mnt/disk1/share

2. Selecting both folders, as I stated earlier in thread unfortunately you cannot currently do this by selecting using webui, but you can manually enter them both and surround with double quotes.

e.g "/mnt/disk1/share/import_CD" "/mnt/disk1/share/Music"

[Lancelot]

Thank you for all the information. I guess I am a bit concerned that running Delete Duplicates against the complete disk will noct only take forever with over 33000 titles, but also bears a risk of messing up my entire music library if anything goes wrong.
Would itt not be easier to move the two dozen albums I have imported via CD drive into the main library and then run the Delete Duplicates task on a mach smaller batch?
I am just not sure how to do this. With my QNAP library I can just go via the Finder on my Mac and reorganize or delete the music library directly. The Melco library I do not seem to be able to access at all via my Mac. I know you talked about „mounting“ the library to be able to manipulate its content, but I don‘t know how to do this either.

[Lancelot]

Forward looking can I change the settings such that new imported CD‘s are incorporated into the main music library by default rather then being stored in the CD import folddr?

[paultaylor]

@Lancelot

Thank you for all the information. I guess I am a bit concerned that running Delete Duplicates against the complete disk will noct only take forever with over 33000 titles, but also bears a risk of messing up my entire music library if anything goes wrong.

You could run in Preview mode but I get your point.

@Lancelot

Would itt not be easier to move the two dozen albums I have imported via CD drive into the main library and then run the Delete Duplicates task on a mach smaller batch?

I gave you a solution for Eric Clapton just need to specify the two locations in one go

e.g "/mnt/disk1/share/import_CD/Eric Clapton" "/mnt/disk1/share/Music/Eric Clapton"

If you want to run against more then you can mount drive as follows:

How do I access Melco music disk from MacOS

It is easy to access your Melco music drive directly from your Mac as follows: From Finder select the Go menu and then select Network [window1] Your Melco should be listed, select it and when the popup window comes up select to connect as Registered User with username of nobody and password of nobody. If you tick the Remember this password in my keychain option as well this will allow your Mac to automatically connect to your Melco on restart. [window2] Click on Browse and select th…

How do I mount the Melco Music disk on a Windows PC

From Windows Explorer, right click on the PC icon and select Map Network Drive [image] Select Preferred drive letter and enter ipaddress (or network name) of the Melco [image] Click on Browse and select the Internal folder and OK [image] Select Finish When prompted to enter network credentials enter username nobody and password nobody [image] Now contents are visible under your preferred drive letter [image]

But I’m still hoping you will run Status Report task because even if same folder I expect your duplicate settings are incorrect for the metadata in your files anyway.

[paultaylor]

@Lancelot

Forward looking can I change the settings such that new imported CD‘s are incorporated into the main music library by default rather then being stored in the CD import folddr?

Sorry I don’t know if that can be changed, that is a Melco question best option is probably the Melco Audio Users group

[Lancelot]

Just ran another status report.

[paultaylor]

I can see you updated to SongKong Amnesiac 10.4 and then ran Delete Duplicates00196 report, but I cant see a Status Report.

Are you sure you ran Status Report task (first task on toolbar) and did you run it before running Create Support Files again ?

[Lancelot]

Sorry - no, I probably missed the former. Just did it again.
By the way, with the help of your geat instructions i was able to see the Melco libraries on my Mac. Would it not be the easies to delete the 2 duplicative Eric Clapton folders right there by moving the ones from the CD Import library into the bin?

[paultaylor]

Sorry I still cant see a Status Report, do you understand what I mean when I say run a Status Report ?

@Lancelot

By the way, with the help of your geat instructions i was able to see the Melco libraries on my Mac. Would it not be the easies to delete the 2 duplicative Eric Clapton folders right there by moving the ones from the CD Import library into the bin?

If all you want to do is delete some particular files, well yes I suppose so

I was trying to show you how Delete Duplicates work so you can then use it on your collection to find duplicates you didn’t know about.