How to, huge collection, best way, steps, tutorial, scripts

[Grandolla]

Hello all,

I am a new user of the monkey. I have large scattered collection in about 25 files that has been gathered from various friends containing around 650 gigs. It is a complete mess. I

have done a lot searching but have yet to come across a guide or tutorial for new users on how best to clean up their large collections effectively. I am looking for logical script steps

to get this unorganized tangle handled. Like, organize names this way, using this, then use this duplicate finder remove lowest bit rate.. Any suggestions, helpful hints would be

much appreciated. Thank you for your time in advance,

Thanks again,

[rovingcowboy]

1 start up mediamonkey.
2 go to monkeys menu bar and click on tools then click on options then go to library node and click on make new playlist for recently added files, this will help you keep your newly added songs in a known list.
3 on monkeys menu bar go to file. then click on add rescan.
4 on that panel that shows up make sure you select the folders you want to scan for song files.
5 make sure the formats you want to scan for are checked on that panel.
6 click okay.
7 wait for monkey to get done scanning them in.
8 check the new playlists to see if he got all the information for the songs or if you have to type it in?
9 type it in if needed.
10 after typing the infomation in to make sure all the songs are correct. or as correct as can be. you need to sync database. so go to monkeys menu bar and click on edit then click on select all.
11 now go to the monkeys meny bar and click on tools then click on advanced tag managment, then click on sync database.
12 when finished all the song files will have the same data in their tags as monkey does in his database.
this is needed for him to be able to organize them properly.
13 now go to the monkeys menu bar and click on tools then click on auto organizer, this is a manual use one and is safer to use when first setting up your library.,
14 on the panel that pops up make sure you don't see any highlighted red in the left side of the panel list.
if you do you need to change the pathway in the text area to get rid of the red, if you don't get to use <artist> in the text line you need to go back to the options and turn on the use user friendly masks option.
every thing typed between the slash will be made in to a folder like \my music\ the stuff after the last slash is the file information.
15 finish typing in your local url for the files making sure there is no red and click the okay button.
16 when you click okay you will see monkey move your files to that local url how ever, if you did not sync the database then he could toss them all over the place.

[k_r_eriksson]

It's not that simple as Rovingcowboy makes it sound like. Step 8 and 9 will take forever with 650 gigs of music. What do you mean by 25 files? Do you have 25 folders with music? How are the tags now? Are you missing a lot of artists and albums? There is no universal solution to your problem.

[Grandolla]

Hi guys,

Thanks for your quick replies. Well each folder is somebodies music collection. The music obviously is not all
labeled the same because of this. The artist, album, year.... are not in order. I have some collections that are labeled correctly, including art, that are lame 3.8 and up and nothing but full albums..

What I would like to do is; label the entire collection info in a uniform manner, and strip the duplicates keeping the highest bit rate. Some of the individual files or collections have albums, but each track is in its own folder...I think the correct way is to click the album and the tracks are contained there within.

I do not know if it is possible but would like to keep the albums in tact during a dup scan. I do not know how MM wants to merge the files together, files meaning each collection.

Will a duplicate script like, advanced duplicate find and fix, replace a lower bit track with the higher bit to keep the integrity of an album?

That is probably good for now.

Thanks again for your time,

[rovingcowboy]

monkey can't do anything with them until you get them in his database.

and you should not use any script or feature in mediamonkey to move the songs until you get the song info corrected and sync'd with monkeys database information.

monkey works how you want you have to follow the rules of his wishes but he does only what you tell him to do.

if you want them all stored in folders for each album then set the pathway mask up like that.

example.

C:\My music\<artist>\<genere>\<album>\<title>

that will give you all the songs listed by their title in folders called by the artist and the genera and the album

you could change album and artist around if you want too but those are the song tag information so get it correct.

[k_r_eriksson]

I think dups find and fix will do what you want but I'm not sure because I have never used the script.

First decide how you want your files on the hard drive. 650 gigs must mean 100 000+ files. That is a huge work. I would sort the collection first in two. One part with folders or files that match how you want it and one part with problem folders or files. Then add the good part to MM. Edit what you need. You can use the tag from web. Maybe use auto organize on them or do the organizing yourself (I don't trust auto organizing). Then I would add a small part of the problem files. Now you can use dup. find and fix or other scripts. Here are a few good ones but there are many more.

Tagging Inconsistencies 3.9.4 (2009-01-10)

RegExp Find & Replace 3.6 w/ 101 presets (2009-07-02)[MM2+3]

Magic Nodes 2.7 w/ 170+ masks & real GUI (2009-06-29)[MM2+3]

When you done add a little more and so on. Good luck and keep us posted.