Hi everyone,
I'm having a 'upgrade and tidy up the library weekend', and got such a helpful response to my other question, I thought I'd try again
This is a general appeal for advice - does anyone have any experience on managing a library that contains both FLAC and mp3 copies of the same music?
At the moment my set up is that MC only sees mp3 files. I also have FLAC files elsewhere on the disk, in a folder MC doesn't know about, that are same CDs as the mp3 files.
I've been wondering about "upgrading" MC from mp3 to FLAC for a while, but have been putting it off as it seems like this is a major retagging job. The mp3 files tags are set how I want them - tidied up (classical music, so the automatic tagging services are generally a mess) and with a couple of custom fields set.
The FLAC files are not tagged at all, beyond the Artist-Album-Track info that EAC imports.
Has anyone been in this situation and have any suggestions on how to proceed?
It seems like I could:
(a) retag the FLAC files as I want them, and hope never to have to do this again, but this would be such a big job I probably just wouldn't.
(b) use some external tag editor to export all the tag info into a database and reimport it. If so, does anyone know which is best? As far as I can see, Mp3tag only does mp3s, and won't re-tag FLACs. It seems like the problem here is the FLAC files - there are far fewer tools for these than mp3.
(c) do something terribly clever inside MC that I don't know about - tell it 'hey, see this album, its the same album as this one, so copy X to Y please'. I've found the (very useful) tag editor on the right-click menu, but this seems only to copy tags around within the same file. Or am I using this wrong? Is there a way to do this simply? Or to have both sets of files side-by-side and tell MC they are duplicates of the same album somehow?
I'm comfortable editing text files by hand - I've had to do the iTunes manual edit after moving music to a new hard drive, so am happy with the idea of a manual edit of the MC database file doing a search and replace of ".mp3" to ".flac" - if this is safe and going to work.
Thanks for any suggestions people can make,
Cheers
Jamie