I'm a reasonably tidy person. I like all my files to be neat and clean of abnormalities. Yet every time I load my music into Banshee or rhythm box they arbitrarily and sporadically throw out duplicates sometime triplicates with out rhyme or reason. I've put up with this for several years...I need a cure!
Is this in relation to your other post about mounting your drives when playing music? I wonder if the music player is caching the MP3's while its playing? Or maybe they are just shortcuts?
Short cuts, that's what I'm thinking as they don't take up any appreciable space on the drive. Most likely a Linux thing , a way of keeping track of mounted drives.
If I enter my mounted main backup drive and go one up with the arrow I changes from showing my contents To this
Where are your MP3's stored? I hope they are shortcuts. Maybe your media player has an option to not automatically make a link to the MP3. I'm sure it does that to find the songs quickly next time you want to play your music
The copy I feed my MP3 player is on it's own 90 gig SSD driver. After much thought , I'm guessing that at some point Banshee asked me if I wanted it to search my drives for music other than what's on my Music drive, and I unthinkingly said yes. This mixed my MP4a conversions, I keep for backup with my MP3's on the music drive. I spent 4 days at lest 50 hours going though 6700 songs eliminating the M4a's from my MP3 files. I now have 4640 songs, that's how bad thisv was. Anything beats having to reacquire the CD's from the library, and re-rip them. So I think the main problem is solved.
At first I thought I was totally screwed then I noticed that the files I wanted to get rid of pushed the song count way up, sometimes doubling the number of songs in a folder,So I started with that. Still I had to work my way though the list three times and I still won't be surprised if a dup shows up now and then. Around a 1/3 of the songs were m4a and had to go. If MP3 and Mp4a's are mixed Banshee takes for ever to scan the music fold and usually gives up and crashes. It was taking around 5 mins when it could complete to scan my Music, now it takes around 5 seconds.
Do you remember exactly how you queued up your music the first time? Maybe your Music player decided to convert your music and now you have duplicates because of it.
Thanks Boo, but it's unlikely Conversion takes a long time, 24 hours last time I did it, No I'm pretty sure I forked my self this time. I dimly remember thinking I shouldn't do this if I don't know the outcome....then I did it! ":O} I think the mounting of drives is a completely separate thing at this point.For a long time I was approaching this in a rather stupid manner. I have 5 copies of my music and I would make changes when ever i felt like, leaving me in a mess as far as having ONE master list of my music and working from that then coping everything to the other locations, Thumb-drives, hard drives and PS3. So this clean up was A long time in coming. I think I know as I said what happened to my music. But Gizmo won't tell me what's up with the mounted drives... I think it's an Admin type thing.":O}
Unfortunately yes. I helped my Dad with backing up a few times and found that he didn't clean out My Documents directories. So he had old My Documents in My Documents. I wasn't about to go through all of those files, but someone will have to at some point.
That's exactly what I kept telling myself..."Someday I'll clean this up...then I had to get it done or risk losing my music!
Frustrating huh? Its even worse at companies. The nature of data is that its always increasing. People at work are always paranoid of loosing data, so they keep everything and always add more. But they never go back and clean up. So there is a lot of useless data. Imaging in a hundred years from now. We will have googles of useless data stored and no one will be able to clean it up. Its like a digital dump full of trash nobody wants.
