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[gworrel]

My music collection has gathered many duplicates over the years and for years I have tried to rid myself of them. I have looked for help here on the forum but never found a solution that seemed straightforward. Today I took another stab at the problem.

My music is on my HTPC in my basement which is connected to a projector. It is not a good place to work so I started up a client version on my upstairs office PC and loaded the library from the HTPC. I then started following the directions in this post: http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=69546.msg468588#msg468588

Immediately I was lost when he said to "set up a specific viewscheme for the purpose."  I have no idea what a viewscheme is. I searched the wiki.  The closest thing I could find was http://wiki.jriver.com/index.php/Add_a_View_Scheme_or_Group.  Following the directions there, I was again lost almost immediately. I knew what the tree was. Don't ask me how because it is not so labelled. But when I right clicked on Audio, there is no option to "Add View Scheme."  Was it the same as "Add library view"? Who knows. Maybe the terms were changed but no one bothered to update the wiki?

Continuing on, I could find nowhere to enter the quoted text of: "~dup=[Album],[Artist],[Name],[Track #],[Album Artist /(auto/)],[Album Type],[Year],[Genre]"  I managed to fumble through the selection options and set rules for file display to be only duplicates using the parameters in the quote. 

Then I sorted by file type within groups and started selecting blocks of files to be deleted. If the dups included one flac file and wma, I wanted to keep the flac and delete the wma. If it was mp3 and wma, I wanted to delete the mp3. I manually went through and deleted about 1000 files, telling it to send them to the recycle bin every time since there was no option to always delete that way.

There was a gap of a few hours in the process described above.  I started at lunch time, then continued when I got back home.  After I finished deleting, I used logmein to check the HTPC.  The HTPC had gone to sleep. The changes were never made. The client never told me that the changes could not be made. There is an option to sync changes but I tried it several times and it kept giving me an unknown error and said to double check my connection. 

This is really frustrating. Does it really have to be this hard?

[Matt]

Sorry for the trouble.

I'd like to see a duplicate handling tool.

Until then, you can do quite a bit with Smartlists.

For example, this will show duplicates:
[Media Type]=[Audio] ~dup=[Album],[Artist],[Genre],[Track #],[Name]

Or this will show only one duplicate (so will be empty once you have no duplicates):
[Media Type]=[Audio] ~dup=[Album],[Artist],[Genre],[Track #],[Name] ~nodup=[Album],[Artist],[Genre],[Track #],[Name]

[gworrel]

Thanks for the reply, Matt. The client still shows the changes but when I attempt to sync, the error message says "There was a problem sending changes to the server: Unknown error, please ensure the server is running and that your connection is available."  Is there any hope for getting the sync to work? The HTPC is up and running. The client says the library is loaded. The "New Library View" I created still only shows the duplicate files that I did not delete. How do I get the changes over to the Library Server?

[Matt]

Sorry, but if the server goes away in the middle of a session, I'm not sure if anything will work.

Normally I would say restart everything and try a few simple changes if you were having sync problems, but that doesn't help too much here.

[Matt]

As an aside, if you configure the clients to auto-sync (which I'd strongly recommend), it sends changes every few minutes.  That means the server might have a lot of the changes.