Hi everyone!

This is my first post. I've been using mp3tag for about a year now, slowly repairing the damage iTunes and Musicmatch Jukebox did to my collection in the years before.

Right now I have my folder structure organized like so:

X:\MP3\%artist%\%year% - %album%\%tracknumber% - %title%

And it's worked out pretty well for me thus far. The problem I'm having is that due to the source of some of the files, the values I get aren't always correct. Specifically, the individual tracks in an album by an artist will have multiple values for the year value, resulting in multiple entries in the directory for the same album, due to the format I use.

What I was wondering was if anyone had a method of filtering out the offending albums? I'd just pick through the folder structure manually, that would take an unpleasantly long time.

As MP3tag can only compare data from within one file at the time but you would require a comparison of data between (at least) two files you cannot do it with MP3tag alone.

But you can export the data and use Excel or Access to do the comparison.

You might try loading up the whole library and sorting tracks by artist/album/year/track. This may make it easier to visually spot mistmatches. At least it will be easier than going through folder by folder. You can create your own columns and their sort order by right-clicking in the column header and selecting 'Customize columns...'. It should also make scanning the list easier if you reorder the columns and place artist name, then album name, year, track number and title next to each other. Reordering columns is also done in the Customize columns dialog. You can look for instances where an album has more than one year and where the track numbers aren't sequential.

Until you've gotten the years completely sorted out, make sure you don't rewrite any more folder locations and further splinter your library into more directories. Once you do have it sorted, you can rewrite all the paths. I suspect that you'll then be left with a lot of empty folders to remove.

This is not necessary if you use an action of the type "Format tag field" for _DIRECTORY. This will rename the currrent directory to the new standard. And if all ALBUM and YEAR match then you will end up with only one folder for each album.
Empty folders are sometimes left over if you use the converter TAG - FILENAME to create new folders.

What happens if you have the following? I assume this would be an appropriate example if you had previously run a directory renaming operation in Mp3tag that resulted in splitting one album up into multiple album folders because of different YEAR values in individual tracks.

\Music
..\Various Artists
..\..\1981 - Best of the 80s\04 Some Title.flac
..\..\1982 - Best of the 80s\05 Some Title.flac
..\..\1982 - Best of the 80s\01 Some Title.flac
..\..\1983 - Best of the 80s\09 Some Title.flac
..\..\1985 - Best of the 80s\03 Some Title.flac
..\..\1985 - Best of the 80s\06 Some Title.flac
..\..\1985 - Best of the 80s\07 Some Title.flac
..\..\1986 - Best of the 80s\10 Some Title.flac
..\..\1988 - Best of the 80s\02 Some Title.flac
..\..\1988 - Best of the 80s\11 Some Title.flac
..\..\1989 - Best of the 80s\08 Some Title.flac

Say you went back and changed all the YEAR fields to 1989 and then ran that action - would the other six folders be left empty or would they all be renamed to the same thing, resulting in a single folder?

Yes. That.