Mass Rename Copies Instead

[stanley]

Hi,

I've been using gmb for years now and it's positively the best thing going. The thing that first attracted me to it was its ability to "Find songs in same albums". I have all my music on an external hdd, in part because it doesn't all fit onto my internal hdd. So I copied some albums onto my internal hdd, then in gmb I used the above feature to find my duplicate albums, sorted by folder path, and removed from the gmb library those on the external hdd. Voila: my complete library accessible, commonly accessed albums on the internal hdd, and the full library safe and secure on the external hdd.

That worked fine* when I started with gmb. But now my gmb library has info about play counts, date added, etc. that will be lost by the above method. The Mass Rename function is great, and it preserves these meta-data. Could an option be added to Mass Rename to copies the files, instead of moving them? Even better if there's also a sub-option to remove the original from the library when finished.

( * The trouble for me now on this is having two albums of the same name, say "The Best Of" by different artists. My library generally doesn't have the Album Artist tag set, without which "Find songs in same albums" thinks both "The Best Of" albums are the same album. But that's more minor.)

I know, Quentin, you're planning to change the move/copy/mass rename dialogues. Perhaps you've already thought of this. I have brainstormed other ways to accomplish this but nothing's quite right. One would be to embed the play count, date added, etc. into the files. But I think that info should be in the gmb library database not the mp3's/flac's/etc themselves, and ideally I would mount the partition with my full music library as read-only. Another would be to Mass Rename all desired albums from the external hdd to internal hdd then use rsync or similar to copy them back. But for big libraries that's a lot of unnecessary writing to the harddisk. If there's another clever way to accomplish this I'd be keen to hear.

Many thanks, for this and for a great piece of software.
Stanley