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Author Topic: Any way to check the consistency of the music library?  (Read 2226 times)

globetrotters1

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Any way to check the consistency of the music library?
« on: July 02, 2009, 11:15:02 am »

hi guys,

is there any kind of function to check a MC library if the data on hard disk and the data in the library are consistent?

I sometimes have very strange messages popping up, like "couldn't find the appropriate file (with the name of the file)" during tag updates and found out that the name in the library was an old and not the actual file name. Also deleting the album from the library, re-importing it, re-loading the tag values from the file/folder structure didn't help. Some days later this exact album silently disappeared from that list during the next tag update. I checked and everything was just fine. Wow...

That kind of situation makes me think and makes me feel a bit "strange" (no other word comes to mind).

Well, a check function would be cool, which points to the possible errors I might have in my database... with a report (?)

Thought it wouldn't be bad to ask
thanks

Martin
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globetrotters1

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*bump*

would be nice to get an answer
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Matt

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  • Shoes gone again!

Auto-import is designed to detect external changes automatically.

You can also manually update files from tags or the other way around using the "Library Tools" menu.
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Matt Ashland, JRiver Media Center

globetrotters1

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Matt,

thanks for your response!

I already know all what you mentioned. I'm right now at the brink of 250'000 music tracks and I feel a bit bad if I think of an automatic function supervising the contents of my RAID volumes. I had troubles already re-building the database from scratch and found out the hard way that this can only be done if you do it in chunks of something like 20'000 tracks. Too much at once can kill my database, it's that simple. I ran into problems with analyzing too many tracks at once and had to limit that to 2'000 tracks in one run. I'm fine with these limitations, I just want to know them and can save a lot of time like that.

That's why I thought that checking the contents of the database against the physical contents of the music files on disk would be a good idea. The situation I described in my first post is a weird one and I'm just not feeling very comfortable, that's all. Probably re-loading the tag database from the physical files (one character at a time to not overload the memory...) is the other alternative.

Question: would you advise to use <Media Center>-<Import> (in Windows Explorer) rather than the function "Update Library (from tags)" within MC13? or is the result exactly the same?
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globetrotters1

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in addition:

I now checked out all the 'Unassigned' positions and found there 2 albums which are just fine, all the usual standard. But... in the database they show as 'unassigned' and I can do what I want, they stay there. I deleted, re-imported, deleted tags, re-built tags, whatever I did, they didn't disappear.

I'd like to know how I should handle these cases please!

And no, I don't want to re-build a database with roughly 250'000 tracks once again because of these two strange cases... thanks :)
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Chili-Jam

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  • same same ... but different

There are ways to check if a file exists or not. I don't have MC available but you can make an expression with something like fileExists(), just search the board.

Since you don't seem to be comfortable with all the library functions that do exist why don't you make yourself a small library for testing before you apply things to your 250k tracks?

Try to avoid changing your files and tags with other applications. If you handle everything within MC you never have to search for your files or update library from tags.
And you should backup your library ;)
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