Re-ripping to higher quality

cahinton · Post by **cahinton** » Tue Oct 16, 2007 8:21 pm

I have a fairly large collection (~8200 tracks) that was ripped several years ago to VBR192 mp3s to save disc space. Now that drive space is cheaper, I bought a huge drive and have been re-ripping selected discs to FLAC and using the MM sync-settings to downcode them when they are synced to my mp3 player.

Is there a way to replace the existing tracks and keep the corresponding database entries (playcounts, ratings, etc)?

Teknojnky · Post by **Teknojnky** » Tue Oct 16, 2007 8:30 pm

There is no 'easy' way, however you can use Bex's advanced duplicate finder script to replace lower quality files and migrate metadata etc to the new ones.

cahinton · Post by **cahinton** » Tue Oct 16, 2007 8:49 pm

Yup -- I found that about two minutes after posting the question.

Note to self: Search, then post.

MCSmarties · Post by **MCSmarties** » Wed Oct 17, 2007 10:26 am

Use Maaspuck's amazing CopyTags script to transfer all existing tags to your new files!

nojac · Post by **nojac** » Wed Oct 17, 2007 10:54 am

But are you really able to hear the difference between mp3 192 VBR and FLAC?

And when you have to downcode on sync, I would suspect there is little to gain.

OK, off topic

cahinton · Post by **cahinton** » Wed Oct 17, 2007 11:35 am

Not when I was only listening to them on headphones or computer speakers. I also recently purchased a wireless media player and hooked it up to my home-theater. That's where I hear the difference.

trixmoto · Post by **trixmoto** » Wed Oct 17, 2007 5:46 pm

My Duplicate Report script can not only find all the files for which there are multiple versions (based on Title/Artist/Album) and select the highest bitrate as the one to keep, but also has a merge feature for copying all tags (including play history and playlist entries) from the old track to the new track.

cahinton · Post by **cahinton** » Wed Oct 17, 2007 11:20 pm

So close -- it works and lists the duplicates, but I get an SQL error when I press "Flag Dupes".

Error: Starting a transaction while some query is open.
yada\yada\DuplicateReport.vbs, Line 733, Column 10

I am using MM3 and didn't really expect this to work as you have it marked as "Needing Upgrade". Any ETA on MM3?

trixmoto · Post by **trixmoto** » Thu Oct 18, 2007 3:52 am

It's on my list of scripts to upgrade for MM3, but still waiting for more details on what the scripting changes are for MM3. Still not sure how multiple artists are going to be handled yet.

cahinton · Post by **cahinton** » Thu Oct 18, 2007 8:15 am

Are there scripting changes for MM3, or just database schema changes? VB script is VB script, unless they are adding some sort of API layer.

trixmoto · Post by **trixmoto** » Thu Oct 18, 2007 8:41 am

There is a COM object which is used to access the database, we have no indication of what changes will be made to this. At the moment it does not handle multiple artists at all.