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Excluding data folders from auto library imports

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kane2:
I saw this was asked for MC23, but never really addressed.

There needs to be a way to exclude specifically named data folders that can appear within the directory for a specific album. Many other programs create these folders, usually with specific names, and they purposely contain files that look like music but aren't.  The best way would be for MC to have a grep like exclude in the auto import list for a library.
So if the Music Directory is structured something like

~/Music/Artist 1/Album 1/

          Song 1
          Song 2
          Song 3
          Song 4
          Song 5
          Song 6
          data_folder/
          Pure Music Bookmarks/

~/Music/Artist 2/Album 2/

          Song 1
          Song 2
          Song 3
          Song 4
          Song 5
          Song 6
          data_folder/
          Pure Music Bookmarks/

Your auto import list could look like

~/Music/
--exclude "*/Pure Music Bookmark/*"
--exclude "data_folder"

so MC would ignore anything it finds in folders with these names (kind of how "rsync" works). On my computer EVERY ONE of hundreds of albums contain this kind of information. Unfortunately there is no scripting interface on the Mac and the Web Services Interface doesn't offer a way to remove a file from the library, just playlists.

Any ideas or help would be appreciated. Right now MC25 thinks every other track it found is a song, and it simply stops when it gets the fake data in these folders.

         Jeffrey

blgentry:
Ouch.  That doesn't sound like fun.

Question:  Do these files have extensions that look like audio files?  Meaning do they end in ".mp3", ".aac", ".flac", etc?  If so, that seems like a really poor design decision

Agreement with you:  It would be nice to have a way to exclude things using a regex or wildcard or something similar for cases like yours.

Workaround:  Since all of the files you want to exclude are in directories with regimented names, you can easily delete all of those entries from MC.  Just do a search for one of the common directory names like "Pure Music Bookmarks".  Use the double quotes so that it takes all the words, in order, as a group.  Without the quotes it will match on all instances of each word in all monitored fields.

Then when it shows all of the "wrong" files, you can just delete them from MC by highlighting all (Command-a) and pressing delete to remove them.

I would do this search from Audio > Files, or a similar files based view that shows filename.  That way it's easy to check to see you are selecting the files you want.

Please make a library backup first!  Double check yourself before deleting a huge number of files.  If you screw up, restore your library backup.

Finally, when doing a delete operation, you'll get a box that asks you if you want to delete just the library entry, or actually delete the file itself.  In this case you only want to delete the library entry and leave the file on disk alone.

Good luck,

Brian.

kane2:
The same problem was posted a year and a half ago without any good resolution <https://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=114092.0>

The files  contained in these directories look like music files as they are used to fool iTunes into playing flac entries. The above thread was trying to eliminate indexing folders named _gsdata_. I was playing with creating a smart play list using the 'Filename(path) contains "Pure Music Bookmark.pmbmf"', but I can't figure out how use the resulting list to trim the library itself. Also I cant find a way to create the auto-import scripts that might be able to have an exclude command it them. Removing similar files or folders from a library shouldn't be this hard after 25 versions of the program.

I would think I could just select the list of files, and select some command that would remove the library entries, but I can't find ANY method of doing that

Any thoughts on how to use the results of this smart playlist to remove them from the library would be GREATLY appreciated.

                     Jeffrey

JimH:
When you set up auto import, you can choose a directory and then exclude it.  Or you can tell MC which type of files to import from it.

kane2:
We aren't talking about a single folder or two. Every Album directory contains one of these folders (Hundreds of directories total) all filled with small files that appear to be music (but aren't). Comes out to thousands of songs.  I can find them using the smart play list and Filename(path) contains.... , but can't figure out how to tell the library to then forget all the songs in the smart playlist.

This doesn't solve the ongoing issue for new music that is added, there really should be a grep like way to do this either in the auto-import program (either via the wizard, or by creating and auto-import preference file that would contain what files to include, and what patterns to exclude.

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