Read existing metadata and move files

[barneyg]

Hello again,

It seems that a lot goes wrong when I “Fix Songs” during the matching process.

For most of my collection, I already have the artist, album, song and track name data applied. What I’d like to do is use SongKong move them (using the existing data) to a folder structure of: Artist\Album\Track # - Track name

For example: Aerosmith\Rocks\01 - Back in the Saddle.mp3
and so on for the rest of the album for my entire collection

Is this possible? I’ve tried for days to figure out how to do just this in SongKong. I guess I could’ve just used iTunes and had it “copy files to iTunes Media folder” when adding to library as it does this and be done with it, but I no longer use iTunes.

Thank you

[paultaylor]

Hi, its not very clear what your issue is. Are you saying SongKong is not renaming files, or you cannot get SongKong to rename files without adding more metadata ?

If the second, SongKong was originally designed so that yo could do everything within Fix Songs, but with hindsight I think better to split into a few different tasks and I do plan to take Rename Files from metadata out of Fix Songs and make own task.

In the meantime I think if you disable the following options on the Match tab then SongKong should not do too much except rename songs

• Search for a MusicBrainz match
• Update from Discogs
• Search for a Discogs match

[barneyg]

I’m sorry about not being clear. As I said, the vast majority of my music collection already has basic metadata (Artist, Album, Track #, name and album art) applied, but every mp3 file was in just one directory, so performance was poor when reading this directory.

I think that the way that iTunes separated the music into a separate directory for each artist, then within that directory, each album was placed and each track on the album was placed within the album directory is a good idea for organization and better performance.

When I attempted to accomplish this renaming and moving of mp3’s into a similar structure, many things happened to the files that I’d prefer not happen. For example adding Disc number to the track name or separating them into one track into its own folder.

I did as you recommended, deselected those items and it worked once, then edited a cloned version of the mask to duplicate the iTunes behavior…somehow the mask keeps getting changed in the preferences from what I selected.

Thank you

[paultaylor]

Before you start Fix Songs you can select a predefined list of options from the Current Profile list, any changes you make to the options will be saved to that profile (you can also make a copy of profile using Clone button)

and on the Filenaming tab you can specify the mask to use (plus a different one if you want for compilations)

But what you cannot do here because it made the interface too complex is actually modify the mask itself. Instead you can modify masks and create new masks in the Preferences

So you can select a mask in Filename Masks to Edit ,and then if you use that mask in Fix Songs it will use the modified version of the mask. But when you open the Preferences window nothing is selected to start with because it is just a list of all the masks available, its not the mask you have selected.

@barneyg

When I attempted to accomplish this renaming and moving of mp3’s into a similar structure, many things happened to the files that I’d prefer not happen. For example adding Disc number to the track name or separating them into one track into its own folder.

Its is very difficult for taggers to correctly identify albums if you have multiple albums in one folder because songs are often available on multiple albums and if your existing metadata is not perfect its not always possible to correctly group the songs correctly. This is another reason for organizing songs into Album Artist/Album folder.

If SongKong put a one song in its own folder it is probably because that was the only song that had a particular value for Album to start with, or SongKong matched to another Album