Copying info from MP3 to FLAC

[Scottes]

About 10 years ago I ripped my CDs to 224kbps MP3s. Now that hard drives are much cheaper, I've decided to re-rip them to FLAC.

I've modified my MP3 tags quite a bit over the years, and I'd like to get this info from my MP3s to my FLACs. My ratings are of utmost importance, since they drive what I listen to and what goes onto the player and in the car, etc. I could live without the rest of my changes, but I do not look forward to re-rating ~12,000 songs.


Is there an add-on which could do this? If a FLAC and an MP3 matched on Artist + Title + Album, then copy Rating from MP3 to FLAC.

I'm not so sure that these three fields will all perfectly match, so that may be an issue.


If not, I will start looking into programming it myself, which isn't that big of a deal, but why re-invent the wheel? I have looked through many of the addons here, but didn't get the impression that any could match those three fields between two different formats. Granted, I could have missed something - Advanced Search & Replace is pretty big, and my criteria could be buried in the list of features somewhere. But Search and REPLACE scares me a bit, because I don't want to stomp on any existing info.

Thanks in advance.

[Troya]

viewtopic.php?f=2&t=13000

[Scottes]

Pretty damn sweet. Thanks!


Alas, I am going to have to get creative because Advanced Duplicate Find & Fix is looking for exact matches and finding about 1/10 of what I think it should find. This is not ADF&F's fault, but likely to be slight differences in naming. As a test, I wrote a quick script in Python to compare filenames in lowercase, and that finds 4x what Advanced Duplicate Find & Fix found. That's still less than half of what I expect to be "duplicates."

Back to the drawing board... I suspect that I will have to fix the capitalization so that both the FLACs and MP3s follow the same naming conventions. That I can come back to ADF&F.

[Peke]

Just an idea, when doing case sensitive searches but want to do insensitive you need to remember correct case but put in search all Upper or Lower case.

It is common issue, I hate when it rises up.

Other Common issue I had recently is double space.

[Scottes]

I had to do a *lot* of cleanup of artists and song titles, actually. I ended up writing a Python script that got the list of unique artist names, and then did a fuzzy compare of each artist name to every other artist name, spitting out close-but-not-perfect matches. For each of these near-matches I queried MusicBrainz to find which was correct (at least according to MB). This process changed every variation of an artist's name to a single one. I used to have six different variations of "Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young" - now all their songs are under a single Artist, as it should be.

Then I did the same for all the song titles. That was a beast, because the script had to compare and look up so many song titles. Once all the variations were combined I was finally able to compare every MP3 to every FLAC, matching identical songs and copying the tags from each MP3 to the corresponding FLAC.

It cost me some time, but I now have a much cleaner database. The tags for 12,000 tracks got pretty screwed up over the last ten years...

[Lowlander]

I ended up writing a Python script

Something that you should consider releasing to the public as others may find this helpful as well.

[Scottes]

Something that you should consider releasing to the public as others may find this helpful as well.

Yes, I can see people finding it helpful, but not necessarily useful to non-programmers. I don't code professionally or anything - I just bang on keys until I get results.

As such, it is more of a collection of routines rather than a cohesive script. Is there a place for such code snippets here? I have to say that I had a helluva time figuring some stuff out due to the lack of Python examples for working with MM. I'm sure that other Python-MM beginners could find it useful.

[Lowlander]

You can post it in the addons forum or if you really feel it is incomplete in the addons developer forum, perhaps someone will like to collaborate on making it a complete solution.