Had the day off today so decided to do spring library cleaning, it’s actually Autumn here.
I’m a Mac user and long time Serato user. In my early days of acquiring music files I never bothered with the name of the saved files since Serato will read the id tags anyways so my music drive is littered with thousands of “Track 1” “Track 2”… you get the drift. I also have all those files with jumbled characters in the name eg %/&32pac%&Hit£&&em%%up
I proceeded on the mission to find how to rename those files with the proper “Artist - Title” . A quick poking around on Google I came across a free program called “kid3”, it basically reads the ID3 or ID4 tags and renames the files with it. It does batch processing too. I didn’t loose any of my cue points nor beat grids. But I reckon I might have lost crates location.
Following this I used the “Rescan ID3 tags” in Serato to refresh things and locate the old files that are now missing since the name has been changed
After which I did try to relocate lost files but it didn’t link them as the name as changed obviously. No biggie.
Caveat, this method suits me because I’m quite OCD with track titles in Serato itself.
I will push the tracks to respective crates eventually.
The second thing I did was to use another program called Dupe Guru to find doubles. This is one program you have to be careful with as it not too specific. eg
Luis Fonsi ft Justin Bieber and Daddy Yankee - Despacito (Remix) and Luis Fonsi ft Daddy Yankee - Despacito
is seen as duplicates.
I spent the better part of the entire day listening to the dupes before highlighting for deleting. It kinda gives you a match probability in % that the suggested dupe files are 100% but I don’t trust it.
But when it does locate true duplicates it rates the higher bitrate or file type higher and gives you an option to delete all the 128kbps (cough cough limewire files)
Strangely enough it doesn’t read FLAC bitrate, it shows 0 under the bitrate column, so my FLAC files are always at the bottom of the batch of dupes, but it tells you the file type and in that case I just click the MP3 to delete.
I have recovered about 70gigs in hard drive space already.
I’m still at it, going further down rabbit hole.
Anyways that’s how I’m spending my day off work.
How was your day?