Hi
Sorry do not have the time to answer all of your questions in detail. But I always get scared when I hear things like this
Also, I am so "paranoid" about overwriting the data on the hard drive when and if I try to experiment.
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Of course you have your media backed-up regularly. AND you manually backup up your MC Library after every major tagging sessions right??
I have a medium size library of approx 6500 cds. I have a local backup and an archive backup that I keep hidden. On each backup I have a backup of the MC library which is small and takes seconds to save to disk. The costs of 12 tb of harddrives is nothing compared to retagging my music! Anyways Steve, this is not directed necessarily to you, but I have a friend who uses external hard USB drives -- VERY large collection 16 terrabytes of cds - and he doesn't have any backups because he says it is a PITA backing up external drives ... euh drives WILL fail, or get stolen -- and guess what? thats what happened to him -- power Mac and his external drives stolen
Of course when you experiment you shouldn't change 1000's of files in one go - try a couple of albums, if this messes things up CTRL+z will let you undo it. Some fields write to files some don't. Backing up your library files is the easiest thing to do and restoring it after a big error takes less than a minute for under 4tbs most of the time. JRiver will do this automatically for you, but not necessarily when you want it to. File=>Library=>Backup is your friend
Most of the fields will or can be written to disk if they are just data fields. Check options to see if interested.
So if not done already, I'd heartily recommend
1) have a backup work flow
2) have a simple but clean filepath organization on your HDs. Most of the time this would be something like x:\Music\Album Artist\Album\+tracks and artwork with a compilation and/or soundtrack subfolder, and maybe a dedicated Classical sub-folder if they are ripped by composer, (splitting drives you might need a x:\Music A-M and a Y:\Music N-Z or something like that.
3) choose what you want to call multiple album artists (eg. Various Artists, Multiple, whatever just be consistent) so you might have something like x:\Various Artists\Album\tracks. It really is not necessary to split out content by bit rate btw. People do, but personally if I have a Miles Davis album in normal FLAC 16bits and another album of his in a HR version, they are both in the Miles Davis folder (different Album folders though). OK can be a little more complex its subjective except for long path names which could come back to haunt you. So generally, do not split up albums (for multiple or box set cds I have one Album folder, but underneath I have \CD1 \CD2 etc.)
when that is done like you want it, if it wasn't already of course. You can simply select your 5000 tracks and type in the [Album Artist] field in the tag window, one time for all, "Various Artists" (or Multiple) for compilations -- normally easy to find because the are empty and show as unassigned. This will sort your problem out in one go. (Again try a few FIRST before - making sure that they are indeed compilation type albums).
However, in the case where they are not compilation albums, which can happen with bad/inconsistent tags imported from the web, there is another way of bulk tagging these. (I'll get back to you if needed on this, but its usually better to do this one manually imho) Lastly there is an aesthetic choice of grouping multiple cd albums under one Cover (eg Albumx cd1 Albumx cd2 etc, will show as separate albums). In this case you just need to select the tracks and use one Album name for all.
Just in case you are not aware, metadata which is embedded in the file is dependant on the file "container". FLAC is the best for this. WAV files can't store as much. Some formats can't store anything and need sidecar files. Regardless, you are not messing your audio up, this does not affect SQ at all. If you embed very large image files into your files they will get bigger, but the audio will not be affected. You could mess up a lot of very good tags that you spent tons of time on though ... why backups can save you.
sorry out of time. Not meant to be a sermon, but its surprising that some people will spend 300 bucks on an interconnect but won't spend 100$ backing up their source media.
If no one else chimes in, I'll get back to your other questions a bit later oki?
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Topic: audiophile but amateur audiophile pro in the making (Read 2841 times)