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In Reply to: RE: Need software to compare flac and apple lossless tags posted by Goober58 on September 30, 2014 at 10:49:56
I don't know about compare, but you can copy between alac and flac or between flac and alac and dBpoweramp music converter will move all of the tags for you. The batch converter will do an entire library.
Tony Lauck
"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar
Follow Ups:
When you say - "dBpoweramp music converter will move all of the tags for you. The batch converter will do an entire library." do you mean convert or move tags without converting?
I use the batch converter all the time and it's not so clear as I how can get it to "move tags" without converting.
Give me rhythm or give me death!
If the ALAC and FLAC files have the same sampling rate and word length you can convert back and forth as many times as you like and you will get the same audio samples. The only issue in converting would be if the word size or sample rate was different for two versions of the same track. Then the "conversion" process would produce different audio samples as an unwanted side effect of copying the tags.
Why do you have two libraries in the first place and what are you trying to do? This will determine the best approach.
Tony Lauck
"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar
"Why do you have two libraries in the first place and what are you trying to do? This will determine the best approach."
I bought an OPPO BD-95 which required FLAC as well as a cohesive file structure (conflicts with how iTunes labels directories on import). Instead of storing ALAC and FLAC in the same directory tree I saved them in two separate but identical trees. I went to DBPoweramp CD ripper and Audacity (from Audiogate and iTunes import) in order to streamline the ripping and tagging process when I was setting up the FLAC directory for the OPPO. At this point I stopped saving my wav files and have considered the FLAC files my archive. Since then I've been ripping as FLAC and after tagging making the ALAC folders.
I'd rather not convert, but I might have to to a get consistent tagging. It might be worth the possibility of corrupting the integrity of one format or the other. Yea I know I should have more confidence in the sw....
I've had a policy of fixing typos/issues in tagging as I've seen them. Sometimes I fixed it in both sides, sometimes just in one. Also I just completed adding the year field, which has been neglected over the years, but I only did this in iTunes.
Give me rhythm or give me death!
Since you've made the FLAC your "official" archive you should be OK with trashing the entire ALAC archive, recreating it from the FLAC archive. This will be safe provided the FLAC album is complete and correct. In suggesting you "trash" it, the point is to think carefully about whether there might be some tracks that you don't have in FLAC or where the ALAC version is somehow better. If you're happy with trashing the ALAC library then here's what I would do:
1. "Trash" the entire ALAC library, perhaps by temporarily renaming it and then ultimately deleting it.
2. Use dBpoweramp bulk converter to convert all the FLAC files to ALAC. This will also copy the tags.
3. Do any directory reorganization as appropriate for iTunes, etc...
4. Vet the new ALAC library.
5. Now really "trash" the old ALAC library that you'd renamed.
There are various ways to set up the dBpoweramp bulk conversion, which means there are various ways to screw this up. I suggest a trial run with a few albums first to make sure that this is going to go well and doing careful vetting before doing the actual bulk conversion. Also, I suggest you take care to make sure you don't run out of disk space...
If your library is huge, there are some more practical considerations. First, you will be moving a lot of data around and shaking things up. So if any of your hardware (e.g. disk drives) are weak, they might fail at this point. So I would take care that you have a complete set of backups prior to beginning. Next, I would use the preliminary run to estimate how long the entire operation is likely to take. If it's more than overnight, then you can batch convert portions of it, doing one portion at a time overnight.
Tony Lauck
"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar
Thanks Tony.
FWIW - both directory trees are identical, confirmed to the song named file ( -extension, thank you Beyond Compare ). The ALAC tags are more complete than the FLACs so I want to preserve the ALAC tags.
I don't want to reconvert and that is the point of my query.
Give me rhythm or give me death!
If the files are all 44/16 just convert all of the ALACs to FLAC. Again, you will have all the same audio samples. The only concern I would have would be if you were to convert 24 bit files. That's because there have been (at least in the past) issues with 24 bit ALAC implementations. (For that matter there were issues with 24 bit FLAC back around 2005.)
Obviously, if there is software that just copies the tags it will take less elapsed time. However, you will have to find and learn this software. I just use dBpoweramp, click and let it go and come back when it's done. I don't care about elapsed time, just how much attention I have to pay to it.
Tony Lauck
"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar
Yes I have high res files in FLAC that have been down converted in ALAC to maintain compatibility with my devices.
I would rather copy tags than reconvert. I don't have time to do the comparisons manually. There are going to be relatively few differences so if I know where they are I think (I could be wrong) I can do it manually. Yes it will probably take longer but it would be worth it to me to preserve the lineage of each library.
Give me rhythm or give me death!
I know the MusiCHI tagger can read all the meta data and store it in a file or a MusiCHI data source.
You import the FLACs, export the tags then you import the ALACs and import the tags.
This of course requires both to be in exactly the same sequence.....
The Well Tempered Computer
Yes that makes sense. I could create files, one for FLAC tags, one for ALAC tags and compare those files for differences then manually make changes using MP3tag. Or better yet I could do it the way you are suggesting it can be done (again the confidence thing).
I've got 2200 or so albums, probably averaging greater than 10 songs per titles, and am interested in comparing 8 tag fields. That's more than 150,000 fields to compare. I've been fairly consistent but I'm betting there's going to be 500 or so albums with relevant differences. An automated process would be great.
I'm going to look into purchasing the tagger you mention then I've got to decide exactly what my next step is going to be.
Thanks for your input.
Give me rhythm or give me death!
Mp3tag can also export tags in any number of different file formats (File > Export, or Ctrl-E). You might do it in CSV and pull the files into Excel for comparison. There are a number of export "configurations" included with Mp3tag, but you can easily edit them or create new ones. If you need additional help, ask in the Mp3tag support forum and someone there will almost certainly help.
What are the eight fields?
The eight fields I want to compare are -
album
album artist
artist
year
comment
track
title
genre
These are the 8 fields I populate with for each record. I already know the file names are the same using Beyond Compare.
Give me rhythm or give me death!
Here's a configuration file to create a tab-delimited CSV file that should be easily imported into Excel. I've also included the file name (full path, with directories), but you can easily figure out how to remove it if you like. I've put the fields in roughly the order that I think would be most useful. The comment field could potentially be very long, so I've put it last. Again, they're easily rearranged, but just make sure you're putting tabs between them.
This sorts the output by the full file path (in the $loop() parens). If you organize your library by album artist/album/track number, this would probably be the most useful ordering of the output. If you use a different structure or file naming convention, you might want to come up with something else.
$filename(csv,utf-8)File Album Artist Album Track Title Artist Year Genre Comment
$loop(%_path%)%_path% %albumartist% %album% %track% %title% %artist% %year% %genre% %comment%
$loopend()
Here is Mp3tag's Help page for Export functionality, which explains some things and also shows many additional 'placeholder' variables.
What I was thinking you could do in Excel, if indeed you have the exact same number of files in both libraries and they're in the exact same order is:
1. Load one library in Mp3tag.
2. Export it to a CSV file.
3. Load the other library and export it, with a different CSV file name.
4. Import each file into Excel, on separate worksheets.
5. Create a third worksheet that compares parallel cells in the other two worksheets and displays something only if they differ. You could display just an 'X', or display the contents of the other cells, doesn't really matter. Most cells should be blank, so only the differences would stand out. The third worksheet should show a filename on every line so you know which files to edit.
Thanks for the plan.
This works for me -
Use mp3 tags to create .html files - I had to add genre and albumartist fields (and remove filename field) to the supplied .mte file.
Use Beyond Compare to do a text compare. The list is populated in order of track number - which is a consistent field between the two libraries.
Since the trees and filenames (extension ignored by beyond compare and not reflected in the .html file ) are identical the order of everything is correct only differences in the headers are shown.
Since everything lines up, for the most part I only have to look at the comparisons at the top of the .html file - ie. track 1 data for each album. Genre and dates are going to be the vast majority of difference.
I can then use mp3tag to manually enter the changes make the changes.
I'll do all this work in temporary backup directories.
I feel more comfortable doing it this way than to "import" the tag data. For example I manually created and manage the directory structures for both libraries - I create the artist/album/song stub for each recording then copy it into the library.
Thank you very much for the great suggestion!
Give me rhythm or give me death!
I've got the recommended MusicHi software here for evaluation - I hate new software.
I'll check out using MP3tag for this function as it, with DBPoweramp, Beyond Compare and Audacity already comprise my music computerizing tools set.
Give me rhythm or give me death!
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