How to recreate the beets database without modifying existing files

[Matthieu Talbot]

When I tried to use again beets, I re-imported the music folder inplace. This resulted in tons of copies of my music files to "normalize" and "asciify" things.

How can I revert the created files, and how could I have avoided this action to begin with ? :/

I am considering a search by created dates, and delete theses files, but then the beets database would be corrupted.

Best

[Adrian Sampson]

First, we always recommend making a backup of your music before doing anything—I assume you don’t have one of those to revert to?

Second, **after making a backup**, you might try doing `beet rm -d` to delete all the newly-imported duplicates, leaving you with the old files you used to have.

Adrian

> --
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "beets" group.
> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to beets-users...@googlegroups.com.
> To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/beets-users/4fb891c1-0282-4648-936d-270fce08468b%40googlegroups.com.

[Matthieu Talbot]

Hello Adrian,

Thanks for the instruction. So it seems like the duplicates (7k+) have been removed. I will keep the backup around so I can restore things if I notice something went wrong along the way.

Now the beet database seems empty (’beet ls daft punk’ yields no result)

How do I import the existing files without duplicating them ?

Best,

[Adrian Sampson]

Great! Now might be a great time to re-read the autotagging guide in the docs, which answers this question and more. You will want to pay attention to the flags that control copying (-C) and possibly the “no autotagging” flag that lets you just trust the current metadata (-A).

Adrian

> --
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "beets" group.
> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to beets-users...@googlegroups.com.

> To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/beets-users/CAE4XnTzF3w_jPK-EBbc310NtNAFtQ%3D7YxRasf-QxH9xMnc4Tzg%40mail.gmail.com.

[Matthieu Talbot]

According to the doc, I modified my local setting to "import:copy:no" and "import:write:no", and used the "-A" flag to trust imported tags. After that, I tried to load some playlists and... unfortunately, something went wrong. I verified and in fact, lots of files are missing.

So I restored my music folder backup (thanks for insisting on backup there), delete the duplicates with "dupeguru" (oldest file is reference), did the "import:copy:no + import:write:no + -A" method again and now I think that now I have all my files. =)

---
Matthieu TALBOT
neog...@gmail.com

+33 629 22 15 70
fr.linkedin.com/in/matthieutalbot
http://www.soundcloud.com/Marty-Lake
http://lifehacker.com/5028808/how-eom-makes-your-email-more-efficient

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/beets-users/7A009C96-748E-4A7A-B729-EDCCA33FA1CF%40gmail.com.