Music Library Cleanup and Merging

Process

File Name issues

• Find all files with missing extensions
  • find <folder> ! -type d -regex "[^.]+"
    replace "<folder>" with directory to search. It cannot contain or be "." due to the regex used. This will find files with no "." in their name.

• Find all files with MP3 and make them mp3 (confirm options for "rename" they change from OS to OS)
  • find <folder> -name "*.MP3" -exec rename MP3 mp3 "{}" \;

• Find files that are DRM protected and remove them or the protection

#!/bin/bash
if /tmp/mplayer/mplayer.exe -ao dummy -identify "$1" 2>&1 | egrep -i -q -s "encumbered with drm"
then
        echo $1;
fi

• Find files with special or unicode characters and fix

find . -name "*[$(/bin/echo -e '\201')-$(/bin/echo -e '\377')]*" | tee /tmp/filelist.log

• Examples
  • \302\264 becomes apostrophe
  • \342\200\231
  • \241\257
  • \242\245
  • \222

Tagging

• Save "contextual" meta data like folders
  

Folders may represent compilations or playlists which were created artificially due to a lack of support by the library/player/etc. This contextual information should be saved prior to any file renaming and possibly before any tag corrections.

• Find full and mostly complete albums and verify tags
• Rename these tracks to new folder structure
  • OST/Various Artists
    • X:\_Stage\pass1\V\Various Artists\%album%\$num(%track%,2) - %artist% - %title%
  • Single Artist Albums
    • X:\_Stage\pass1\$left(%artist%,1)\%artist%\%album%\$num(%track%,2) - %title%
• Incomplete Albums/"singles"
  • • X:\_Stage\pass1\$left(%artist%,1)\%artist%\_Singles\%title%

File Format/codec/bitrate Issues

• Convert wma to MP3 with same quality and transfer tags
  • Load all tracks into MP3TAG and sort first by bitrate and then by encoding.
  • Go to the bottom and select all wma with bitrate set (missing bitrate most likely means a damaged file)
  • Open Xrecode
  • Drag from MP3TAG to Xrecode all selected tracks
  • Select mp3 output
  • Select encoding rate
  • (optional) Select tracks in MP3TAG by bitrate and choose encoding rate in Xrecode based on source
• Use MP3Tag to normalize track numbers to 2 digits.
  This will help in fixing tags using Jaikoz in a later step
• Open Folder in Jaikoz
  • sort by track number then subfolder
  • open

Tools

• MP3Tag is for bulk changing of tags and file renaming. It can look up tags online but Picard tends to be better.
• MusicBrainz picard for tagging based on audio fingerprint.
• Replay Gain is a technology for audio level normalization.
• xrecode$$ is a tool for recoding to different formats that supports moving of tags.