How to Reorganize a Media Monkey Library with Lots of Playlists

A work in progress MM = MediaMonkey

Tags
“A guide to reorganizing a large MediaMonkey Library”

MediaMonkey Version 4.1.18.1853 Gold
Microsoft Windows 10 Home 10.0.15063

I wrote this guide as I was researching how to reorganize my music library. Media Monkey has many capabilities and features that make this extremely easy. It is flexible and powerful. This guide pulls together the steps I think are prudent when undertaking this task. First thing, buy a USB drive large twice as large as your collected works.

BTW, my library was in pretty good shape, until I whacked it. It was either when I was adding some public domain music or when I was creating previews. I never really had to do much with MM, it just worked. Then I started adding non standard (missing meta data, etc) files to the library. My original library was segregated into 2 major sections. Everything I ripped from CD originally was in folders by my own “genre” classification. The actual genre classification in the metadata was much more diverse than my personal “genre”. Everything else was added to “Recordings Purchased After 2009 Music”. I used this setup for over 10 years, and never really had to think or worry about it. I am know going to set up automatic rules that keep my library organized the way I want it. I hope this guide gives you an idea of some of almost unlimited things you can do with MM. This post is rather long, mostly because it shows lots of examples and details. The Short Story (TSS) is, I fixed the crap I added to have 2 of my own “genres”. Then I set up automatic rules to keep the rest of the library organized by the original genre in the metadata.

My Original library:

D:\
Classical Music
Jazz Music
Miscellaneous Music
My Music
Other Music
Our Music
Pop Music
Recordings Purchase After 2017 Music
Soul Music
Soundtracks Musicals Music

E:\
Christmas Music
Recordings Purchased After 2009 Music

Let us get started!

1) ->File – Create Reports – Click on Statistics

MediaMonkey Music Library Statistics (Edited)

Totals
Type	Library	Played
Artists	876	491
Albums	722	461
Genres	64	49
Years	70	55
Playlists	118	108
Tracks	6929	1750
Length (h:mm:ss)	502:55:23	125:20:46
File size	155 GB	37.4 GB

Top 10 Genres
Tracks	Genre	Length	File size
2080	Rock	151:35:48	54.1 GB
944	Classical	73:11:44	17.0 GB
899	Jazz	79:15:09	25.0 GB
435	Blues	26:40:33	8.60 GB
367	Soundtrack	21:34:41	6.37 GB
359	Pop	24:45:13	8.13 GB
233	Soul	13:00:03	4.29 GB
195	Variété française	11:41:58	3.82 GB
112	Christmas	4:21:55	1.32 GB
79	PublicDomain	2:33:19	304 MB

….

Generated by MediaMonkey ON Sunday, November 5, 2017 at 9:04:42 AM

Add up the space you see in File Explorer Properties for your Library

D:\ 107.0GB
E:\ 48.7GB
=========
155.7 = Library File Size from above. Yeah, they agree!

->Click on Entire Library in the Media Tree

->File – Create Reports – click on the file list format of your choice. Save copies of these reports to compare totals etc after your reorg.

2) Backup your music (and other media) and MM files

How to Backup and Recover a MediaMonkey Library
Updated by Russell Samuels on Nov 30, 2014
http://www.mediamonkey.com/support/index.php?/Knowledgebase/Article/View/63/3/how-to-backup-and-recover-a-mediamonkey-library

I backed up everything under
C:\Users\{USERNAME}\AppData\Roaming\MediaMonkey

CDPlayer.ini
Extensions
Extensions.ini
favicons
MediaMonkey.ini
mediamonkey.m3u8
MediaMonkeyDEc2011.ini
MetadataCache
milkdrop_config.ini
MM.DB
Plugins
Scripts
Skins
xcopy "C:\Users\{USERNAME}\AppData\Roaming\MediaMonkey\*" "I:\MMDB\*.*" /s /r /y /q /d

I also backup my Milkdrop2 visualizations: C:\Program Files (x86)\MediaMonkey\Plugins\Milkdrop2.

I also exported all my playlists with a script (Tools – Scripts – Export all Playlists)

3) Fix problems with your library

You can fix issues you find, or you can just ignore them. This does let you find some things that otherwise, you might have forgotten about. You should probably review the settings you have for you library under:

->Tools – Options – Library

There are a lot of options. I use:

I turn on File Monitor for a folder “To Be Organized” when I add new files to the library.

Library

Tags and Playlists

Metadata lookup

This is one of the most important sections I will discuss later. I learned the hard way to click on “Delete emptied folders”.

Auto Organize

I turned on Automatically organize file (during scans and edits) for the reorg. I turned it off after. I turn it back on when I add new files.

Apperance

Media tree

To edit a song or multiple songs, select them in the media tree, right click , -> Properties. Change the fields you want to change. When doing multiple files, you can change things like genre, but not title.

You can tag things with multiple genres

http://www.mediamonkey.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=34372

Review the sections in your media tree under Available Tracks (also Music):

Artist & Album Artist
Album
Files to Edit
Genre

Look for unknown and other anomalies. Missing titles, album names, album artists, genres etc.

I have a few files that are sound clips, previews, funny clips from the internet, public domain music (for videos I post to YouTube etc), ripped from vinyl that have issues. I have files that I just plain screwed up. I scan under Albums and other categories see stuff that’s not right.

Album Excerpts (Sound clips)
Doctor Gary
Doctor Gary (Doctor Gary)
None
Track 10
Ultimate Download Disc and MediaMonkey Guide to Better Sound (ceu) (I screwed these up by using artist instead of album artist when I put thes in my DB)
V-Disc-308A
gj (gj and others)

I also looked at the files in Windows File Explorer. I navigated to the folders called Unknown (etc.), I see some of the MM library issues in the files on disk:

I have /Unknown/Unknown.

Back in MM, check the section Files to Edit in your Media Tree under Available Tracks. Give it some time to work. Review the sections you care about under Files to Edit. It don’t care about ratings and beats etc, however, some folks really like this capability. Fix the sections you care about.

For Unsynchronized tags
http://www.mediamonkey.com/wiki/index.php/Synchronizing_Your_Tags

Select all files in this section (Ctrl-A).
Click Tools > Advanced Tag Management > Synchronize tags…

Multiple Artist Albums –
If you have an album that has multiple artists, like a Woodstock album, you will get the artists for each track, but, the whole album will have “Various Artists” for Album Artist. That is the reason they have that field.
I have 2 albums called Greatest Hits, there were different artists, that confused the multi album process, but otherwise it worked really well. See Optimize Database – Create Multi Artist Albums.

I had instances where Artist / Album / Genre information was missing or inaccurate. I had files I edited and created for ringtones, or for phone messages etc and the stuff I downloaded for Videos (Public Domain). My genres for these items was all over the place or missing. I reviewed the section under “Genres”. When you sort the column for genres by genre, you can get a list of all the empty genres!

I setup new Genres for:

Excerpts = from internet, audacity whatever, if it could be claimed as copyrighted

Genre -excerpts
Album -Album artist
Album artist -Artist

Examples
ItsABeautifulDay, U2 U2
It’s a drag getting old, Rolling Stones, Rolling Stones
ClintonLew, Unknown, Unknown

PublicDomain is for anything that is not copyright protected
Genre – PublicDomain
Artist – unknown
Album – ShortClips

I fixed the tags for genre (my main organization rule).

Some things have subtle problems. It will prompt you if a file is read only. You have to give it some time to work on occasions; however, the Monkey is pretty snappy. I was unable to write the tags for some .wav and .ogg files. I selected the files, Tools – Convert Format, select “convert replace”, and I rewrote the tags and it worked. The new mp3 files had the tags. Then I did not see a few files, I tried to rescan, but, I had checked , ignore files shorter than 20 kb.

Again, do not forget to update the tags in your files after editing:
Click on Unsynchronized Tags, it will scan your entire library.

->Tools -Advanced Tag Management – Synchronize Tags.

And on another note, if you see strange things in the Media Monkey Library, trace them back to the source files. I bought ‘Green Onions’ by Booker T and the MGs from Amazon. It ended up showing up under up in the under media tree Artist and Album under “Booker T. and the MGs”. I shows up under Artist & Album Artist twice. Amazon had coded the meta data with Booker T. as the contributing artist and album artist as Booker T, no period. In this case, you delete the libtary entry, edit the source file to be consistent and rescan into the library.

4) Where are you going to store your new Library?

Some of the free and other media managers will try to import music files it sees in the Windows default locations for music under libraries, into their own catalog.

C:\Users\{USERNAME}\Music

I do not want that to happen, so for the time being I am leaving my MM library out of the Windows Music Library. I am moving my library to a USB drive that I will eventually connect as a NAS and share with all the computers in the house. There are other options to explore, see “For your consideration” below. If you ever want to include your music in the library structure, it is relatively easy.

How to use libraries in Windows 10

5) Do some Research

Read these topics:

Organizing Files and Folders

http://www.mediamonkey.com/wiki/index.php/WebHelp:Changing_Filenames/4.0

I see collections for Classical Music. There is a category under properties for Type, and it looks like it is for different types of media, mostly, classical music being the exception. I don’t know if we can set up our own collections. I don’t know how MM determines Type = Classical?. I am guessing this is used for different file extension media types.

http://www.mediamonkey.com/wiki/index.php/WebHelp:Playback_Rules/4.0

Auto organize

Configuring Directory and Filename Formats

http://www.mediamonkey.com/wiki/index.php/WebHelp:Configuring_Directory_and_File_Formats/4.0

If you click on Tools – Auto-Organize Files and set up a rule there, it will show you the changes that will be made prior to making them. It will show if you will end up with duplicate files (which will overwrite files). You can use it to move to a different folder, different drive or to network storage. When you use MediaMonkey to move/rename files it will update any Playlists within MediaMonkey. I am trying to set up automatic auto organize rules that will keep my library organized they way I want.

User Auto-Organize File Masks Examples

http://www.mediamonkey.com/wiki/index.php/User_Auto-Organize_File_Masks_Examples

Auto organize problem:
I saw this in the MM forum. While running auto organize “It is very possible that Windows explorer is creating Thumbs file and read it so it is locked for moving. Thus Retry works.”

Turn off Thumbs.db

https://www.computerhope.com/issues/ch001061.htm

To disable it, all you need to do is just to enable “Always show icons, never thumbnails” option in Folder Options. To open Folder Options window, the easiest way in Windows 7 and 8 is to press Win key, type “folder options”, and click it. Your image folders will become so plain and boring once you Apply the change.Nov 2, 20

7) Set up Auto Organize

Review this to get some good ideas of what you can do with auto organize rules.

http://www.mediamonkey.com/wiki/index.php/User_Auto-Organize_File_Masks_Examples

To set up auto – organize rules, Tools – Options – Auto Organize
Double click to edit a rule, or on new, to set up a new Auto-Organize Rule.

2017-11-08

Expand the arrow by Genre and select the genres for this rule (and destination). In this example I show the last rule for my set, the default. Click on Configure and you will see the dialog box below.

Note the destination, I:\Default is hardcoded as the first item. Be sure to use album artist so that multi artist albums go to Various , instead of every different artist.

2017-11-26 (1)

I setup destination folders for the main categories (Classical , Jazz).

I have the Classical collection, and I moved it by selecting on the genre and setting up the destination. Check Type in properties.

Classical\album A collection

Classical
Check that Classical + Opera etc works

Setup the section Organize these files using the following Directory and Filename format.

The destination folders are in bold.

I use #Track – Title for the file name.
Underneath this for each main category (Classical, Jazz…) is the genres that go with that section

\Jazz\album artist\album

Acid Jazz
Bluegrass
Easy Listening
ethnic
Fusion
Instrumental
International
Jazz
Jazz + Bebob
Jazz + Big Band
Jazz + Fusion
Neuvo Flamenco
New Age
Other
Smooth Jazz
World
World Music

\Comedy\album artist\album

comedy

\Christmas\album\

Christmas

Rock\album artist\album

50’s Rock
Alt/Punk
Alternative
Alternative Rock
Blues Rock
Classic Rock
Country
Country-Rock
Electronic
Folk
Folk Rock
Hard Rock
Metal
Rap & Hip-Hop
Rock
Reggae
Pop/Funk
Rock/Pop

Blues\album artist\album

Blues
blues is it case sensitive ?

Pop\album artist\album

Club
Dance
Dance & DJ
Disco
Funk
Latin
Pop
R&B
Vocal

Soul\album artist\album

soul

Soundtracks\album

Soundtrack
Soundtracks

French\Album artist\Album

Varrite francais

Excepts/Album artist/Album

Excerpts

Traditional\album artist\album

Traditional

Jason\Album artist\album

Jason

Rich\Album artist\album

Rich – Richard Van Deuson

Meditation\Album Artist\album

meditative

Default\album artist\album
None (but lowest precedence)

Last rule I set up has no selection for genre, hopefully the exceptions will always fallout there.

I made sure to do both a quick and complete File Maintain Database and I made another copy of the MediaMonkey database before starting the the auto organize.

I also did a Tools – Export All Playlists

Did you review Files to Edit under Available tracks again?

I selected sub sections of my library, for example D:\Blues, and hit the Insert key, and MM did its magic. A couple of hours elapsed time to reorganize my library.

At the end, I still had a few things to fix, so I was editing, Ctrl S, synchronizing tags and then hitting Insert. Easy Peasey after you do it for a couple of hours! I had one album, Bach: Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 1, by Kimiko Ishizaka (free Classical Music) that I had to change the Type from Music to Classical to get in the right place.

For your consideration

Final Thoughts
Exclude your music library from indexing and searching.

When I want to move new files into the library. First I check the tags. Most music that is bought will have valid tags; however, free, Public Domain and other sources may not. If I need to I fix the tags. Then I move the file into my folder “To Be Organized”.

Turn on File Monitor to scan “To Be Organized” at startup
Turn on Auto Organize
After the new stuff has been has been added, I turn them off.

I am going to do another post on Setting up a Portable Media Monkey Installation.

A view of my auto organize rules

2017-11-07 (1)

Multi Album Artists:

2017-11-07

This is screenshot showing playlists, on the right.

2017-11-07 (2)

If you did not select delete empty dirs under auto organize, this might be helpful

Powerscipt to find empty dirs ( run it multiple times as it is not smart)
(gci X:\ -r | ? {$_.PSIsContainer -eq $True}) | ?{$_.GetFileSystemInfos().Count -eq 0} | select FullName

Where X:\ is the drive:\path you want to check for empty directories

I copy the empty dirs and put it in a batch file with RD (remove directory) and /s to do subs, example:
RD “E:\Recordings Purchased After 2009 Music\AAA\the life” \s

Windows RD in a bat file did not like the characters that are above 128 in the code page, so files like this will fail:
E:\Recordings Purchased After 2009 Music\Björk\Homogenic

This looks like a work around, but I have not tried it:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9849486/is-it-possible-to-use-extened-ascii-characters-in-a-bat-file

The random musings of GMGJ

Reality, is a good place to visit, once in while.

How to Reorganize a Media Monkey Library with Lots of Playlists

1) ->File – Create Reports – Click on Statistics