Compilations Fix

[James Blonde]

Got a problem.... It's an old problem, might not have been caused by MediaMonkey (though it might have!) but want to understand how it happened, and if I can fix it....

In Windows Explorer, I store multi-artist compilations by Album, as you would probably expect. (Otherwise they're all stored by Artist)

However at some point in the past (this is not recent!), "a piece of software" (Might be MediaMonkey, might have been Windows Media Player, might have been something else) has unhelpfully stripped out all of the songs from compilation albums, and put them in their respective Artist folders. So now, many of my Compilation album folders are empty (or only have a few songs), and my Artists folders are stuffed full of fragmented and duplicated compilation songs.

Any idea what might have caused this?? Likely something I'd done, but no idea what, but don't want to accidentally do it again!!!!

Also, any way to automatically fix this? The album / song metadata is probably still OK, so I could use that for most albums, just not sure how to make it work from a file management perspective?

[Lowlander]

In MediaMonkey you could've used Auto-Organize Files or setup Auto-Organize incorrectly.

Verify that Auto-Organize is not set to do this, and then you can use Auto-Organize Files to fix the issue.

[James Blonde]

Thanks @lowlander - yep that, or something like it, could well have been it. It's definitely not set now - I probably did it many many versions ago on a computer long since dead.

I'm probably loathed to play around with it now given what I guess happened before, so I suspect a lot of manual copying and pasting will be in order, though now I've got a workable filing system, maybe it's time I at least start to use some of the basic functionality of MM to help manage my library rather than just look at it!

[Lowlander]

Auto-Organize Files shows the changes it will make. So it would be much easier to use than manual copy & paste (which if done outside of MediaMonkey causes more issues).

[James Blonde]

Thanks again Lowlander - I'll have a look at it then I've done a LOT of surgery in Explorer anyway so I thought I was probably going to have to start again with the database but maybe I'll have a play around before I do anything too drastic!

[Lowlander]

If you already moved/renamed files you may need to use Locate Moved/Missing Files (make sure to verify matches!).