More > JRiver Media Center 23 for Windows
SOLVED How to have a consolidated view of multiple hard disks like Foobar2000
Spike1000:
Re-tagging of massive collections is not too onerous if done with some thought. Trust me I've done it. :o
I found that a little bit of effort gained enough rewards/benefits to spur me to keep going. It's like the old adage "Q: How do you eat an elephant? A: One spoonful at a time!"
How you do it is key. You also need to know when you want to end up so invest time in planning. I found multiple tools/approaches was the way forward. I started with MP3Tag as I've been using for years. I did some tests and found I could re-number my entire collection resetting the track count at each new folder with a very low error rate. Using the 'I can see all the tags at once for all tracks' in MP3tag could quickly spot blank areas of the screen so I could see where titles etc were missing. Sorting by multiple columns put all the albums missing tracks together so I began to tackle them a 'spoonful' at a time using the lookup tool in MP3Tag. I was never without enough music to play so I just kept going. Once done I used MP3Tag to rename the files from the tag information; again on mass. A bit scary, but I had a backup and the error rate was really low. A DBpoweramp tool helped fix artwork.
Clearly this took a while and needed some tweaking but as I said I was never without enough music to play. I did the final tweaking in MC (have a look here for some handy utilities I used https://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php/topic,110589.msg764452.html#msg764452 and still fix the odd issue I see when I come across it. I'm really glad I did it as I benefit of tags is massive.
Would I do it again if I had to? Absolutely, 100%, I've never looked back or regretted it for a minute! I 'rediscovered' a lot of music on the way too!
Spike
RoderickGI:
Wow. This has moved along since I posted.
AndreaT, please provide your rules for structuring your directories, sub-directories, and file names. Since you consolidate across drives, you must use the same rules for all audio. Correct?
As an example, you may structure your drives in this way;
[Drive Letter]:\Genre\Artist\Year\Album\Tracks
Then Track names may be structured in this way;
(Track number) - (Track name).(extension)
Which is what you said here:
--- Quote from: AndreaT on August 16, 2017, 07:50:54 am ---My current library is organized by 1st level directory, 2nd level dir, and so on down to group of audio files usually named as track number + track name.
--- End quote ---
Also please confirm that you use the same structure on all drives, and for all audio file types. i.e. You don't have different rules for Rock vs Classical music.
If you provide the above, we may be able to help you get it working in the short term, and then you can consider tagging and more.
Note:
The image you posted looks like you just use;
[Drive Letter]:\Artist\Album\Tracks
In which case all the advice above is probably making it hard to see the wood for the trees.
sheppaul:
Haha, I'm in the very same situation. Over the years tagging, I gave up and got used to something like the consolidated view structure of foobar like Andrea. There are many other things you should never get any tags from the internet. After ripping old items, you should type everything by yourself. Manual tagging is really exhaustive task though it is rather easy in foobar's tagging system if the track lists are able to be found from internet. The problem is everything must be properly tagged if you'd like to enjoy your collections with tagging system.
Besides, MC seems to scan the whole files in library from all the hard disks whenever MC is started. Is there any smarter way for startup scanning to check the changes during the offline of MC? When you have massive library, scanning never ends. :p I really hope there is something like everything engine for scanning physical files in hdd disks.
AndreaT:
Hi RoderickGI, sheppaul correctly got the core.
I confirm that all my 5 hdds for a given "target" uses the same structure of directories, sub-directories, and file names.
However, there is not a unique rule for all the "targets".
For example, for Beatles, the root directory is exactly this, but just the first sub is organized by Original release, Remastered, Collections, Bootlegs, and even then I have subs for different editions of the same album (like US, UK and Japan editions) and so on.
For Classis music all is even more complex. Usually I organize by Author, then Editor (EMI, DG, Decca and so on), then my Director or by Musician.
Other matter is when I have to manage Collections of various artists.
So, so far, the best for me shall be to have both views:
1) by folder structure like Foobar
2) by dBase query like MC
Regards
Andrea
DJLegba:
If you can't move everything onto a single 8TB drive would symbolic links work? Check out the mklink command.
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