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[mark_h]

Every week I dump my entire database to an mpl file for external processing.  This processing task populates data for some of my fields and then I reimport to populate my library with the data.  I'd like to store some of the tags data in the actual files but I don't want my entire collection updated IF the data hasn't changed?

How will MC handle this situation?

Will it rewrite ALL tags to files as soon as I import data even if the data is the same?  Or will it only write data if the tag data have changed?

Cheers,

Mark

[Lasse_Lus]

How will MC handle this situation?

Will it rewrite ALL tags to files as soon as I import data even if the data is the same?  Or will it only write data if the tag data have changed?

if you import a ".mpl" all fields in the mpl file will be overwritten since MC does not know if the values are new..if some of the fields are "stored inside file", i do believe that only those fields that has changed will have a new "physical" modified timestamp..anyway that is the case when you do a batch change on a field inside MC that has "stored inside field"

[JimH]

Could you set up a test library?

[mark_h]

Thanks, guys.  And Jim, yes, that's the obvious solution - now why didn't I think of that?!

Mark

[Alex B]

You could have simply tried the procedure with a few test files to find out how it works.

MPL import does not trigger file tagging. If you want to write the changed library field values to the physical file tags you must do "Update Tags (from library)". However, I don't think there is any way to list only the files that were changed by the MPL import. Perhaps you could exclude the excess files before the initial MPL playlist export or remove them from the MPL file when you are editing it.

[mark_h]

You could have simply tried the procedure with a few test files to find out how it works.

MPL import does not trigger file tagging. If you want to write the changed library field values to the physical file tags you must do "Update Tags (from library)".

OK, hadn't considered that.  Should probably auto-write for consistency but I can do it manually after import AS LONG as it only writes out changed tags.

However, I don't think there is any way to list only the files that were changed by the MPL import. Perhaps you could exclude the excess files before the initial MPL playlist export or remove them from the MPL file when you are editing it.

I could certainly update my scripts to be "smarter" in that respect and only have them reimport changed data.

Cheers,

Mark

[mark_h]

Tested and unfortunately, update from tags does write even if no changes are made, which means the entire library would be updated...

[Alex B]

If you can exclude the excess MPL items from the MPL file, you can simply go to Tree > Playlists > Imported Playlists > [the name of the MPL playlist] to have only the changed files listed.

If it is difficult to completely remove the files that do not change, alternatively you could invalidate the Filename field values in those MPL items. It would be effectively the same. MC would skip the non-existing files during the import process, though I don't know if that would affect the processing speed.