Longstanding issue: duplicating files

[jhwells]

I've been using mediamonkey for years, maybe as far back as 3.x and currently running the most recent, 5.0.4.2690, but this behavior is one that I've noticed for many years and across versions so I hope someone has some answers...

My music library is about 30,000 tracks in size and of those, at least 670 are duplicates that Mediamonkey created, for no reason I can fathom. Since I began using mm I have allowed it to manage my library, automatically sorting and moving, etc, but this behavior puzzles me.

Example:


That's a CD I ripped, one time, and over the years mm has made duplicates of three of the tracks, and they don't stop with duplicates. I have one file, a ringtone, with a (5) at the end, indicating its been duplicated a total of five times.

Any ideas why this happens, and seemingly at random?

[Lowlander]

Did any of the duplicates get created by MediaMonkey 5? Date Created shows 2013, so this would be from a long time ago, and not done by MediaMonkey 5.

You can manage duplicates in MediaMonkey.

[jhwells]

I thought it was pretty clear when I explained the circumstances. Yes, mm created them. It's been doing so for years regardless of the version I am running and I don't know why, hence my post.

These are all files that mm automatically added to its database and then duplicated for some reason in the last year.


My workflow is
1. acquire mp3
2. move to the folder mm monitors
3. allow mm to organize the file
4. edit the metadata in mm to add lyrics, etc

These are the details on one file and nothing but mm has managed it since I acquired it.

Did any of the duplicates get created by MediaMonkey 5? Date Created shows 2013, so this would be from a long time ago, and not done by MediaMonkey 5.

You can manage duplicates in MediaMonkey.

[Lowlander]

How exactly do you Auto-Organize?

[jhwells]

I figured it out, possibly. From time to time I take a look at my Music directory and just now found three folders with slight name variations of the band Jane's Addiction.

To resolve that issue I batch edited (in mm) the metadata for all the tracks to standardize on the name Jane's Addiction.

The live album was already tagged with Jane's Addiction, but I selected all songs by that artist and used MM to change the Artist and Album Artist fields.

As soon as I applied the change, the filenames of the Live album in mm all changed to add (2) to the filename, a full set of duplicate files were created in the directory AND the old, mistagged, files were copied into the Jane's Addiction folder, leaving the originals intact and un-deleted.




What I THINK happened was that editing the metadata in mm caused completely new files to be created, rather than updating/over-writing the originals.

What I EXPECT to happen is for mm to update the original files and for those that had an actual change (janes addiction to Jane's Addiction, for example) is for the changed files to be moved into the Jane's Addiction folder and the old folders be deleted. That's not happening:

[Lowlander]

MediaMonkey will just update the tags when editing the files. Do you have Auto-Organize enabled?

[jhwells]

I (and have since I first started using mm) have auto-organize enabled. And, yes, mm should only be updating the tags. Instead, in some cases, it is not doing that, but rather creating entirely new files and leaving the old one's intact.

Here's a video of the entire process: https://youtu.be/5CCuloO4IKg

It may be helpful to change the YouTube playback settings to .75 or .5 speed to follow the action, but I did the best I could.

And here's a screenshot with the Windows file data:

[Lowlander]

Then presumably Auto-Organize is the culprit. Does it happen with Auto-Organize disabled?

If not, it may be a rights issue where MediaMonkey doesn't have rights to delete files.