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Author Topic: folder names changed  (Read 1783 times)

surfstu

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folder names changed
« on: April 11, 2007, 06:18:08 pm »

ok, am new to this and i've made a total mess of my file system.... i used 'find and replace' and managed to give all my folders (originally artist named) a prefix of 'my music' .... so a folder called 'led zeppelin', is now called 'my musicled zeppelin' ... this has happened to hundreds of my folders. i have managed to find a folder renaming piece of software that removes the 'my music' part of the folder name... this works except that mc12 loses the path to all my music (obviously).... i can't bare to rebuild my playlist so i have undone this but i wish to lose the 'my music' part of the folder name  and was hoping someone may have a genius solution for me!
cheers stuart
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marko

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Re: folder names changed
« Reply #1 on: April 11, 2007, 06:33:15 pm »

this should be reasonably straightforward, but before I say any more, could you post the base path for all of your music?

Presumably, all of your artist folders have had "my music" prepended to their names.

You could possibly use the find/replace tool again, or if your tags are all good, the rename from props tool would do the job too.
Need more info first...
common path as it is now + the naming convention you want to use should be enough to go on.

-marko.

surfstu

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Re: folder names changed
« Reply #2 on: April 12, 2007, 04:48:43 am »

cheers for the reply, the path is simply H:\My MusicLedzepellin     however it should be H:\MY Music\Led zepellin ..... i also have many albums that are not messed up and they exist in H:\My Music
cheers stuart
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lalittle

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Re: folder names changed
« Reply #3 on: April 12, 2007, 05:19:47 am »

cheers for the reply, the path is simply H:\My MusicLedzepellin     however it should be H:\MY Music\Led zepellin ..... i also have many albums that are not messed up and they exist in H:\My Music
cheers stuart

marko was right to ask for more details.  I don't think "find and replace" will work since you have some albums under "H:\My Music" that are not messed up -- i.e. you cannot replace "My Music" with "My Music\" since this will change the paths that aren't messed up to "My Music\\".

Without being able to study the situation first hand, but best guess at this point is that using marko's second suggestion -- i.e. "Rename files from properties" -- would be the best approach.  If you check ONLY the "Directories" section and leave the "Filename" section unchecked, the process will leave the filenames alone.  You can then define the base path as "H:\My Music\", with a folder naming "Rule" of your choice (a typical one would be "[Artist]\[Album]".)

If you're not familiar with this sort of thing, my advice would be to do a couple individual albums first just to see how they come out.  Once you confirm that things are working as you want, you can do larger groups of albums, or all of them at once.  It's easy to fix an album or two if you accidentally use the wrong naming convention, but it can take a little while to fix all the albums in your library, so make sure it's working before you commit the entire library.

Larry
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hit_ny

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Re: folder names changed
« Reply #4 on: April 12, 2007, 05:32:57 am »

its times like these that you wish there was some rudimentary support for regular expressions (regex)

Could then make a smartlist that searches for mymusic[a-z], could catch all the wrong folders leaving out those that were mymusic\. A simple search and replace and you are done.

Hopefully Marko will have a workaround soon.
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surfstu

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Re: folder names changed
« Reply #5 on: April 12, 2007, 05:44:18 am »

thanks for the info guys, its working a treat and has introduced me to another awesome feature of mc12!! now i have loads of duplicates all over the place in my library, is there a quick way to remove these?
cheers stuart
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lalittle

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Re: folder names changed
« Reply #6 on: April 12, 2007, 05:52:55 am »

thanks for the info guys, its working a treat and has introduced me to another awesome feature of mc12!! now i have S**t loads of duploicates all over the place in my library, is there a quick way to remove these?
cheers stuart

I'm not sure what you mean.  Do you mean you have duplicate copies of the same song files on your drive, and both copies are imported into the library?  I'm not clear what happened.  Did you do a "rename from properties"?  Did if finish successfully?  If so, MC does not create duplicates during this operation -- it moves the files and updates the library.  Are you sure that MC simply wasn't finished with the current operation?

Larry
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surfstu

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Re: folder names changed
« Reply #7 on: April 12, 2007, 06:14:14 am »

nightmares! firstly, my last post had only tested one album, now i have done the whole library and it has split albums in half..... for example... a folder still exists H:\My MusicBonobo with half the tracks from the album, and a new folder exists in H:\My Music\Bonobo with the other half of the album, the next thing that has happened is that the duplicate files are one with a (1) on the end of the file name, exapmple H:\My Music\ABBA\Super Trooper(1).mp3
and the file H:\My Music\ABBA\Super Trooper.mp3 does not exist although mc12 still displays it next the other (1) file......
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surfstu

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Re: folder names changed
« Reply #8 on: April 12, 2007, 06:30:37 am »

kk, the duplicates have gone, i checked the 'remove broken links' and that fixed that problem, but now i still have many albums split into two different folders?
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lalittle

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Re: folder names changed
« Reply #9 on: April 12, 2007, 03:18:14 pm »

kk, the duplicates have gone, i checked the 'remove broken links' and that fixed that problem, but now i still have many albums split into two different folders?

You need to give us more details.  I have no idea what process you did that led to the current situation -- you never told us what you actually did.  Are you sure that your Album and Artist tags were/are correct -- i.e. were all the songs of each album tagged with the same album name?  Doing a "Rename from properties" with the options set as I outlined in my example would not do what you're describing unless the tags themselves were wrong.  If the tags were correct (i.e. all the songs from each album were tagged with the same Artist and Album name), the process would not split the albums into more than one folder.  It would also not lead to broken links regardless of the state of the tags.  Was the process interrupted?  Was MC shut down before it was finished with the move?  How long did you give it before checking to see if it worked?  Note that renaming the path MOVES all the files, which can take some time to finish.  It sounds like perhaps the process was interrupted before it was finished.

The bottom line is that it really sounds like some piece of the puzzle is being left out of the story -- perhaps something that you didn't realize was significant.  Try to list the specific steps you took and the settings you used -- you need to be as detailed as you can.   We need to know all the information in order to figure out what's going on and how to fix it.  If we could discover the missing piece of the puzzle, I believe we could solve the problem without too much trouble.

Thanks,

Larry
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