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You know the option in Banshee to change the whole folder structure of your music collection according to the meta date? I enabled that. Problem was that it only seemed to change it from the moment you opened the "Change track info" dialog and hit the save button. I wasn't planning to do that for my whole collection, so I looked for an easier solution. I selected the whole collection (CTRL+A), and went to "Change track info". There my eyes fell on a button labeled something like "Synchronize all" (I guess the translation was just unclear), and it seemed to me that that would do what I was searching for... It didn't. In stead, it applied the same artist ID3 tag to my whole music collection, and because of the option for changing the folder structure enabled, it changed the filename for all of those songs too. So I've got a bit of a problem here...
The only things still intact is the title and album of the song (title's also in the filename itself). But the artist has been set to the same for every song. So, my question: Is there a way to rollback the changes? Or is my music collection permanently ruined? I haven't got my hopes up very high, but I figured it's better to ask than to just deleting everything.

jrg
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RobinJ
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    Update: I've already managed to recover about a bit less than half of my collection using MusicBrainz Picard. – RobinJ Nov 10 '11 at 22:03
  • It's very confusing to read what you have done, as you use wrong wording and your sentences are bad. How did you manage to loose all meatdata but still have album and title tags intact? – zetah Nov 10 '11 at 23:08
  • @zetah, I think the question is pretty clear. When you open multiple tracks with Banshee's track editor, you have the option to apply your metadata changes to all selected tracks. RobinJ must have done this for the "artist" field, which broke the metadata and folder structure for all of the songs in the library. – Michael Martin-Smucker Nov 10 '11 at 23:46
  • @RobinJ I assume you also have the "Write Metadata to Files" option checked in Banshee's preferences...? If not, then the changes you made only affect Banshee's database, but the actual song files would still have correct metadata. – Michael Martin-Smucker Nov 10 '11 at 23:49
  • @MichaelMS Yeah, I have :( – RobinJ Nov 11 '11 at 09:22
  • Picard was a smart call. If you have a Last.fm account (and a little bit of free time), you may be able to use the Last.fm Fingerprint extension for Banshee to clean up the songs that Picard didn't fix. – Michael Martin-Smucker Nov 11 '11 at 13:18
  • Hmm... No easier way? I think I'll just copy over what Picard managed to save, remove the rest, and start downloading. – RobinJ Nov 11 '11 at 13:21
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    No easier way that I know of. :( Starting over might be your best bet. – Michael Martin-Smucker Nov 11 '11 at 14:39
  • Maybe blank the corrupted artist field and have Picard match from album+title only? It should be a small minority that have multiple artists for the same album+title. On prevention, I have an USB external hard drive and use rsync to quickly freshen the backup of my collection before reorganising. rsync is hundreds of times quicker than a full copy. – Graham Nov 16 '11 at 18:32
  • This question appears to be abandoned, if you are experiencing a similar issue please ask a new question with details pertaining to your problem. If you feel this question is not abandoned, please flag the question explaining that. I am flagging this for closure :) – Ringtail Mar 01 '12 at 15:50
  • This question should instead be filed as a bug report, and as such is off-topic, thanks! Instructions here. – Panther Mar 31 '12 at 05:31
  • @bodhi.zazen How is this a bug report? I'm asking if there's a way to restore my music collection, now wether anyone can fix something in Banshee. – RobinJ Apr 09 '12 at 11:32
  • IMO it should have not been ruined in the first place. – Panther Apr 09 '12 at 14:57

1 Answers1

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The answer to this was provided in the comments.

Probably the best approach is :

1) File a bug report.

2) Restore what you can using "MusicBrainz Picard"

3) Manually restore with last.fm

If you have a Last.fm account (and a little bit of free time), you may be able to use the Last.fm Fingerprint extension for Banshee to clean up the songs that Picard didn't fix.

Panther
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