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Unknown artist / album clean up using Music Brainz-Picard

Hi everyone... Cleaning out the Unknowns and duplicates... Has anybody used a tool to update the Artist/Album data in the audio files in the iTunes Music Dir? Does Apple Music read the new data AND move the file to he right directory when you make the change?


OR Do I remove the entire unknown Directory, run the MusicBrainz on them and the re-import them back into Music with the assumption that they'll be placed in the right place?


Thanks in advance.



MacBook Pro 13″, macOS 12.6

Posted on Dec 13, 2022 6:07 AM

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9 replies

Dec 15, 2022 6:41 AM in response to ed2345

ed2345, Since your suggestion worked, I poked around and there is a apple script you can run to refresh the music data base from the music files.


https://dougscripts.com/itunes/2017/08/refresh-a-track-from-its-files-metadata/


So, I took a music sample of 500 unknown songs:


1) Ran the script to make sure they are all physically there (No files missing), 2 mins

2) Ran Brainz on the files in the finder and saved the data. The files are still in the same location and the filenames are the same.

3) Ran the script again. NB: The files were relocated to the new directory depending on the artist/album. Empty directories were removed for me. File names did not change.

4) For those songs left in the unknown artist directory (All of 4 files), Those must be done manually.


Thanks for all the help.

Dec 13, 2022 11:22 AM in response to John Mollick

John Mollick wrote:.... Does Apple Music read the new data AND move the file to he right directory when you make the change?



If you make tag changes outside the iTunes/Music interface to a song already in the library, iTunes/Music does not notice the changes until you start the song playing.


It will move it to the "right" directory if you have enabled "Keep music media folder organized" in Music Preferences > Files.

Dec 13, 2022 12:46 PM in response to ed2345

ed2345, That works. Brainz hit the file, once played, it moved. Now for the $40,000 question. I'm a Napster/CD-ripper/Torrent Graduate from the late 1990's. 40k song files. None of the files are protected, all Mp3, with the odd aif. There are 5000ish files in the unknown bucket(s), I'm backed up. What is to stop me from Brainz-ing the lot. But, how to mass refresh the entire library in Music instead of playing each file? Is there a magic wand?

Unknown artist / album clean up using Music Brainz-Picard

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