On 24/05/2022 08:21, Peter wrote:
I was trying to sync two folders with music files. I had been very careless about just using one as the master. The other was on a removable drive. So I had the situation where there were some files on one and not on the other in both directions, along with a lot of duplicates. Also the structure was different. For instance, Couperin's pieces might be in a file called French Baroque on one, but in a file at the top level of the other called Couperin, as I had reorganized the files to make the structure more intuitive. And then there would be some Couperin pieces that were only in one of the folders, in both directions. It was a complete mess.
I spent forever trying to figure out how to do this and finally resorted to Unison, which seemed to work OK, though I did end up with a lot of empty directories on the new master and had to purge them by hand.
The thing I learned, which I really knew already, was to be rigorous. Have a master and a backup, and only make changes to the master. Obvious enough! It crept up on me, because at first there were very few files. But as I converted more and more CDs to flac, to use on a music player, and used the backup independently, it got out of hand.
It's probably moot now. Have you come across MusicBrains Picard?
It looks up your music and adjusts file names, folder names and MP3/Ogg tags, but only if you want to. I use it to standardise my music file names.
You could have used this to standardise names then de-duplicate the files.
Hope that helps
Steve