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Author Topic: Importing: problems and questions  (Read 2391 times)

Denti

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Importing: problems and questions
« on: July 29, 2014, 10:43:09 am »

For complicated reasons I had to clear my MC and add back my 131,000+ songs.

I chose the Import, Configure Auto-import, but did not select any tasks. It took 5 hours and I only got half my files.

I did it again, and I got most of the rest (but still not all of them). For many of the songs I had to "update library (from tags)" to get the tags right. I'm now dragging and dropping a bunch of folders in manually to catch all the files that are still missing.

Is this normal?

Should I have selected "analyze audio" as a task to make the importing more complete?

Should I do it again, now?

By the way: the log generated by the import showed a whole bunch of tracks "skipped" or "failed to import" and yet these tracks were there, but others not. Very strange.
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BryanC

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Re: Importing: problems and questions
« Reply #1 on: July 29, 2014, 11:01:17 am »

For complicated reasons I had to clear my MC and add back my 131,000+ songs.

I chose the Import, Configure Auto-import, but did not select any tasks. It took 5 hours and I only got half my files.

I did it again, and I got most of the rest (but still not all of them). For many of the songs I had to "update library (from tags)" to get the tags right. I'm now dragging and dropping a bunch of folders in manually to catch all the files that are still missing.

Is this normal?

Should I have selected "analyze audio" as a task to make the importing more complete?

Should I do it again, now?

By the way: the log generated by the import showed a whole bunch of tracks "skipped" or "failed to import" and yet these tracks were there, but others not. Very strange.

1. How is the health of your filesystem? Run any checks recently?

2. Import will take quite a long time with 131K songs, probably ~48hrs if you have analyze audio enabled and depending on the speed of your computer. You can always analyze audio after import, but it's probably easiest to let MC do it during import.

Out of curiosity, why did you have to clear the MC database? By far the easiest solution would be to use a backup of the previous library and try to help you from there.
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glynor

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Re: Importing: problems and questions
« Reply #2 on: July 29, 2014, 11:01:32 am »

For complicated reasons I had to clear my MC and add back my 131,000+ songs.

Why?

The one might be related to the other.
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ferday

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Re: Importing: problems and questions
« Reply #3 on: July 29, 2014, 11:28:39 am »

If I'm importing a large amount of new stuff, I always manually import by 'single folder' then set auto import from there.  I've had some strange things happen with auto import on large amounts of files, doing it manually has never caused me an issue, so I've never bothered to care.  Auto import has never caused me an issue on more normal updating (I.e. A couple albums/movies at a time)

I always import first, then analyze later, so I can set it before I leave the house and let it do it's thing
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Denti

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Re: Importing: problems and questions
« Reply #4 on: July 29, 2014, 11:51:55 am »

Why?

The one might be related to the other.

It's complicated. I had artists A-M and N-Z on separate HDs. But I needed to move M over, to make space. I did this and changed the name of the N-Z folder to M-Z. This wasn't smart. In trying to point the M-Z files in MC to the newly name folder I accidentally renamed the subfolders. There was no easy way to go back.

I had made too many tag changes between the last library saved, so I decided to re-import.

The drives have never caused me trouble. Obviously auto-import isn't completely thorough.
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BryanC

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Re: Importing: problems and questions
« Reply #5 on: July 29, 2014, 11:57:08 am »

Obviously auto-import isn't completely thorough.

Have you unchecked "ignore files previously removed from the library" in the auto-import settings and also removed files from the "bad" database that won't be reimported? Create a smartlist, under modify results, select limit database to...select "bad". Remove any entries that you know to be valid files.
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Denti

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Re: Importing: problems and questions
« Reply #6 on: July 29, 2014, 12:05:12 pm »

This is getting ugly. The tags are all messed up. I'm reverting to my old (3 days old) save library and will just re-do all my tag changes from the last three days. That will be easier.

I'm still stuck with all my files now no longer pointing to the correct location. What's the easiest way to fix this?

\A-M  is now \A-L

and

\N-Z   is now \M-Z

All the rest should stay the same.
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Denti

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Re: Importing: problems and questions
« Reply #7 on: July 29, 2014, 12:38:05 pm »

Got it with the replace function in Rename, Move & Copy.

But the Ms are stuck in between. Any way to search for just the files that are getting the red stop sign (missing)? That would help me a ton.
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glynor

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Denti

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glynor

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Re: Importing: problems and questions
« Reply #10 on: July 29, 2014, 12:48:03 pm »

No problem.  For the record...

Find and Replace in the Rename, Move, and Copy tool should work fine to fix any of the broken links.  Also, I've done imports of 100k+ files before without issues, so something else on your system appears to be going on.  I do think you made the right call, generally, regarding restoring your Library from backup and fixing it after.  However...

I'd recommend, strongly, that you at least check your basic filesystem health: http://wiki.jriver.com/index.php/Troubleshooting_Disks#Filesystem_Corruption

If you ever do this again, next time, move the files from within the Rename, Move, and Copy tool.  For one, it shows previews and the new folder structure you create is extremely flexible.  But, more importantly right now, it wouldn't have caused any of this.
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Denti

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Re: Importing: problems and questions
« Reply #11 on: July 29, 2014, 12:53:40 pm »

Thanks for your help!

By the way, with that "missing" expression the playlist has been showing "working..." for minutes now. Is that normal?
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glynor

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Re: Importing: problems and questions
« Reply #12 on: July 29, 2014, 01:15:28 pm »

It can be VERY slow, especially if it isn't otherwise filtered.

It has to check, essentially, each individual file one at a time for "exists" status.
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ferday

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Re: Importing: problems and questions
« Reply #13 on: July 29, 2014, 01:18:24 pm »

No problem.  For the record...

Find and Replace in the Rename, Move, and Copy tool should work fine to fix any of the broken links.  Also, I've done imports of 100k+ files before without issues, so something else on your system appears to be going on.  I do think you made the right call, generally, regarding restoring your Library from backup and fixing it after.  However...

I'd recommend, strongly, that you at least check your basic filesystem health: http://wiki.jriver.com/index.php/Troubleshooting_Disks#Filesystem_Corruption

If you ever do this again, next time, move the files from within the Rename, Move, and Copy tool.  For one, it shows previews and the new folder structure you create is extremely flexible.  But, more importantly right now, it wouldn't have caused any of this.

rename/move/copy is NOT appropriate to move a lot of files, for a lot of users...because it doesn't move associated files!  (log, cue, pdf/jpg booklets, etc)
i move everything myself and use find/replace to updated the database, and it always works fantastic.  it's a shame because the rename/move/copy tool is so powerful, but i only use it for small batch moves because it's a major pain to go back into the old folders and cut/paste a bunch of associated files

please JRiver, consider moving associated path files with rename/move/copy!  
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glynor

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Re: Importing: problems and questions
« Reply #14 on: July 29, 2014, 01:26:36 pm »

rename/move/copy is NOT appropriate to move a lot of files, for a lot of users...because it doesn't move associated files!  (log, cue, pdf/jpg booklets, etc)

It moves what you tell it to move, and any associated sidecar files that MC itself created.

I think that is appropriate.  It would piss me off to no end if it had some kind of magic secret logic where it decided based on filename matching if it should move files that it never created, I'd never imported, and which weren't selected when I did the Move operation.  That behavior would be completely broken, as far as I'm concerned.

I get that it would be convenient in some cases, and I wouldn't be opposed to an option to also move possibly related sidecar files.  However, bear in mind that this could also cause issues.  Imagine if you move files out of a "catch all" directory (that's how I import most of my files -- from a catch all M:\incoming\ folder) which contains large numbers of completely unrelated files all dumped in the root directory.  So, it would have to be able to decide, somehow, if a particular LOG file or PDF "belongs" to a particular set of files, or another one.  Also, what if you don't move them all, or you split an "album" up into pieces (which it'll do depending on your rename rules)?

You CAN solve this problem now.  Simply import those files, and when you do Rename, Move, and Copy, select them all (including the auxiliary files) and do the operation on all of them.

That's what I do, and it works fine.  You do need to tag the sidecars like you do the sources, but this isn't a huge issue in most cases, if you have a well-designed view to use.
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ferday

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Re: Importing: problems and questions
« Reply #15 on: July 29, 2014, 02:03:22 pm »

It moves what you tell it to move, and any associated sidecar files that MC itself created.



You CAN solve this problem now.  Simply import those files, and when you do Rename, Move, and Copy, select them all (including the auxiliary files) and do the operation on all of them.

That's what I do, and it works fine.  You do need to tag the sidecars like you do the sources, but this isn't a huge issue in most cases, if you have a well-designed view to use.

i would still prefer a checkbox (like some other softwares) that moves all the files in the path name...however i must concede touchee, this could probably be mostly solved for me if i just did a better view scheme for tagging only.  thanks glynor, i'm going to flange up a good view today and test it on all the potential sidecar filetypes.
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glynor

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Re: Importing: problems and questions
« Reply #16 on: July 29, 2014, 02:10:33 pm »

Yeah, like I said, I'm not against the checkbox.  But once you think about what it has to do you realize there are a bunch of edge cases, and could be both complex and prone to errors.  If they're all pre-sorted "just so" (everything in the same source directory is going to one, different destination directory) it's easy.  But that's not all, or even most of, the use cases.

Errors when renaming files not explicitly selected can cause data loss, so caution is warranted.  Also, that simplest of cases can be handled, somewhat, if you move them from within Drives & Devices.

It has come up a bunch of times before, and Matt has explained some of his reservations. So... Dunno.  Would be great if it worked perfectly.  But that might be very, very hard to do in all cases.
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