MediaMonkey forum

I've screwed up. I think I can fix it - but I'd like some advice please

I had a bunch of tracks with AlbumArtist = Various. To tidy up my library I wanted to change that to "Various Artists"

I selected the tracks and dragged them across to the tree node "Various Artists". But I had the wrong view up or something and it changed the Artist field, not the AbumArtist and now I have 1000 tracks where the AlbumArtist="Various" and Artist="Various Artists". Not a happy situation.

The tracks are all in the format \Various\<album name>\<Artist> - <track title> so I should be able to use the
Tag-from-Filename feature to fix things. BUT - media monkey is set to Auto-scan and auto-organise on startup - so I'm scared that if I open MM it will rename and move the tracks before I get a chance to stop it which pould put me up sh!t creek....

I don't have any scripts installed (=no database backup). Can any of you tell me how I can back it up manually? then I plan to :
- back up database manually
- rename library folder to protect my tracks
- open MM
- turn off auto organize, auto scan etc
- close MM
- restore database
- restore library
- open MM, use tag from Filename to fix things
- install backup script !!

See any problems with that? And how do I manually back up the database?

Thanks!

Just in case anyone else needs them - instructions for doing a manual backup of the mediamonkey database can be found here: http://www.mediamonkey.com/support/inde ... ticleid=17

You're looking for 2 files, MM.db and MediaMonkey.ini.

Now to go and try foxing my snafu....

I edited the mediamonkey.ini file to stop the Automatic scanning. I changed ScanOnStart lines in the AutoScan section from 1 to 0 - so no need to rename the library etc.

[AutoScan]
autoRemoveDeadLinks=1
autoRemoveArtists=1
autoRemoveAlbums=1
FolderCount=2
Path1=E:\Music\Ready for Library\
Subfolders1=1
ScanOnStart1=0 <---here
Path2=E:\Music\Library\
Subfolders2=1
ScanOnStart2=0 <--- and here

That meant I could open MM safely. Unfortunately MM is so fast that when earlier I thought it was just messing with my tags in the database, it was also processing the files on disk and renaming them - so the TagFromFilename feature will not work for me. bummer.

However there is always MusicBrainz Picard! For those of you who don't know it MusicBrainz is an app that will scan tracks, makea 'fingerprint' for them and try to identify them in an on line database with or without ID3 tags. It's pretty good at guessing if you can give it an artist or an album. The interface is a bit odd to understand - but once you get the hang of it it's a whole lot faster than trying to identify tracks manually! - it's already chomped through about 300 of my 1000 mis-tagged files

Next time to be saver try selecting all files and right click > Track Properties. In the Track Properties you can make changes that will affect all selected tracks.

Drag & Drop has caused other users problems too, by accidental drops in the wrong node. It might be quick and easy, but has a higher error rate.

As you discover it also is used for the Artist field primarily.