Prefer flac over mp3 for the same title in media library, [Support is not for how-to questions/TOS #6] Options

[olfab]

Hi forum,

I ripped all my CDs into flac files for playback on my stereo on transcoded the flac files to mp3 for playback on the radio on my car. The folder structure is like this: Artist/Album/["flac files", Mp3/"mp3 files"]. Consequently each title shows up twice in the media library once as flac file and once as mp 3 file.

Is there a way to setup a filter that prefers flac files over mp3 files if there are two files with the same name?

If there is no way, any suggestions how to cope with the problem?

Thanks,
Fabian

[MrEnergizer]

Thanks Midiman. I have been looking for a solution for this for a long time as well. I already have seperate 'FLACS' and 'MP3s' folders but my problem is how to seperate the mp3s that are unique from the ones that I have FLAC copies of
Is there an easy way to find the unique mp3s so I can put them into a seperate folder?
Thanks

[Midiman]

Thanks Midiman. I have been looking for a solution for this for a long time as well. I already have seperate 'FLACS' and 'MP3s' folders but my problem is how to seperate the mp3s that are unique from the ones that I have FLAC copies of
Is there an easy way to find the unique mp3s so I can put them into a seperate folder?
Thanks

A good question ;-) I fixed my entire directory structure with some VB.NET coding - however it may be possible to code something with VB SCRIPT, I suppose. My VB.NET app compares 2 directories recursively and reports differences where each sub folder is different. To do this, the file extension is ignored - thus if I have a FLAC sub folder with 15 .FLAC files I will report as a warning any folder which does not have 15 .MP3 files - all with exactly the same name of course!

When I was writing the original code, I actually wrote a separate routine along the lines of:

MP3 folder is "master" - FLAC folder is "copy" - if xxx.MP3 exists in "master" and xxx.FLAC does not exist in "copy" then MOVE xxx.MP3 to "\Other" folder structure, retaining the original folder structure. In VB.NET it is easy to get the filenames for all files in a folder and easy to recursively call the same routine for each sub folder in each folder.

Normally, FLAC folder is "master" and MP3 folder is "copy", of course. The program will generate FLAC and LAME commands to convert FLAC to MP3 for all missing MP3 files. The commands are simply written to a BAT file and then executed. However, fb2k can do this action with no programming effort whatsoever and copy the tags from FLAC to MP3 as well. I would be happy to give my VB.NET EXE to anyone who is interested, but I have written no documentation other than tooltips - and the GUI is not the prettiest - however it is functional. So, if you wanted it, you would have to experiment to see how it works ;-)

Mike