Hi, i'm just looking to confirm Yate can do what I need before buying.... would love some feedback on the best way to accomplish the following:

I have 20,000 songs in an Apple Music library that WAS managed... but I've since disabled Keep Media Folder organized to avoid issues with DJ software. Now i want to rearrange the entire "Media Folder" structure (ie. based on top level genre folders instead of what Apple had created) and am concerned about messing everything up with respect to missing files. I'm reading the Yate documentation and, uh, a wall of text is hard to comprehend for someone who's never used the app.

I see the following linking article:

https://2manyrobots.com/YateResources/InAppHelp/Linking.html

Chatgpt says, "Launch Yate and load all the music files you moved into the new folder structure. Select all the files you want to update. In the Batch Rename window, set the "Find" field to search for the old directory path (e.g., OldFolder), and in the "Replace" field, enter the new directory path (e.g., Genre/Artist/Album)."

I'm not sure this is going to be practical, or if it's the correct action altogether, given that i intend to move 1000's of files. Also i wasn't planning on duplicating the media folder (or creating a 'new' media folder), just rearranging the existing one if possible.

Can anyone give me some pointers on what would be the best approach to rearrange a previously 'managed' Apple Music library?

Cheers!

ps. if anyone knows of good overview videos that show how the app is best used, that would be great. I saw the 2manyrobots youtube channel... it's given me a good overview but there are only a couple of short explainers that are almost 15 years old.

Hey thanks a lot for the detailed reply... i really appreciate it! I'm going to come back to this in a bit and post back here to the thread once i've found time to absorb and follow your instructions properly. Again, thanks for taking the time to post your knowledge, super helpful of you. =]

Ok. Just for the integrity of your files, let's go over a few things again.

The desired file structure is:

Genre/Artist1/Album/artist2 - title.ext

Where Artist1 is the Album Artist field? artist2 is the Artist field?

As far as compilations go. What criteria define a compilation? I usually use the compilation field in Music and/or the Album Artist name is Various Artists.

The batch processor will be reading one folder at a time and moving those files. Without pointing any fingers at the quality of the tags in your files a number of conditions must be handled. All files initially in a single folder have to end up in the same folder or they will not be moved. This handles different genres, album artists and album names. You can fix and handle the identified errors after the batch run finishes.

If a group of files has different genres, I can files them under Unknown Genre. If a group of files have empty or different Album Artist metadata, I can file them under Unknown Artist. This may be easier to identify and fix that simply errors in a log. Please confirm. I'll tell you how to fix these.

Sorry, a consistent Artist field works as well as a consistent Album Artist field. If the Album Artist field is empty and Artist is consistent, I will populate it. Sometime today.

I've written the action to work in both batch and interactive modes. It's probably overkill but you will be able to use it when you get rid of any Unknown folders after making repairs.

I've given the action to someone to test. Sorry for the delay. It should be tomorrow.