Happy to report, so far so good. I ran the script on a second Music library and all seemed to turn out well. Thanks again.

What would you say is the best approach if i want to modify the script? A text editor is sufficient?

Ok, after taking a look at the script in the action manager... i think i understand why you offered to write it for me. There's not much chance i could have created that by myself. I ran the script on my full library and all seemed to work well again. Now as i look through the file structure i see a lot of my work is going to be manually moving what ended up in /Unknown Genre/Unknown Artist/Unknown Album/ folders into their correct locations. That's going to take some time.

I'm a bit unsure of the recommended process to physically move files in the Finder without them going missing in Apple Music. There are probably a couple 1000 files/folders i'll have to move... I'm assuming Music is going to lose the path. Is this something Yate can help with? From what i understand... my options after making a ton of file/folder moves are to one by one find missing file in Music (can't see myself doing this)... or re-import the whole top level 'music' folder to Music again (which apparently wipes out some metadata thats in the Music db not the file itself, ie. Love, plays, date added), but does get the job done of relinking the files. If there's a way I can make all the file structure changes without creating a ton more work relinking moved files. that would be super.

Thanks again for the help!

wow that was fast, thanks man. I'll give this a shot now.
cheers

This is by design. About 90% of the action is sanity checks to ensure that stuff originating in the same folder does not get separated. Typically when moving, people are working with full albums and want the files relocated due to metadata changes.

It's not just Genre that is validated. {Album} Artist, and Album are also tested for consistency.

If you want the moves to be strict, I gan give you a variant which moves tracks independent of the metadata consistency. ie. the Genre, Artist and Album folders will contain any tracks which fall into them according to the metadata. However, if there are tracks in the same album which have different genres, they will end up in different folders.

All of this can be done with any level of validation you wish. Currently, the action is validating everything.

Let me know what you'd like.

Yea i was looking closer at the documentation and found myself re-reading the line saying "IF any track in a folder cannot be linked, the contents of the folder are not moved." Is that what's happening?

I doubt it. The linkage refers to the the ability to reference the tracks in Music's db. As you exported all the PIDs toi the files, this shouldn't be the case. When run in the Batch Processor the log file will contain error messages starting with "Certain files could not be linked". hen run, with loaded files, the message will pop on the display. If yopu're not seeing these messages, it's not a linkage issue.

If nothing is happening on certain folders the batch processor's log file should contain error messages. When run on loaded files, a prompt will be displayed. Nothing will be displayed in either case if the files are here the action thinks they should be. I'm assuming this is the case.

You mention " {Album} Artist, and Album are also tested for consistency."... if that is where the failure is occurring, I'm not sure what file metadata I need to add to get the script to process the files... currently the files all have genre/artist/album so I'm not really sure what validation is failing.

The validation tests that all tracks in the same folder have the same metadata in Grouping, {Album} Artist and Album. If these fields are not consistent for every file in a folder, there is an inconsistency. It seems as if this is not what you want.

Perhaps it's as you say, the expectation is that i'm working with albums when that is the one thing in all this that gets zero attention on my side. Compared to genre & artist... albums are pretty much irrelevant when it comes to DJ library organization. I bet if you polled my library 75% of all tracks are one song from one album from one artist.... what i'm trying to avoid is 1000's of artist folders containing one album with one file.

Okay. Album is not important to you. However the agreed upon folder structure was Genre/Artist/Album/files. I have not polled your library and I'm working with the description that I'm given. A few points here. If this is what you have and I cannot count on Album being consistent for a given folder, then I should not be validating the Album metadata. It's looking as if I shouldn't be validating anything.

Your listed workflow makes sense except that it differs from what is implemented. First off is the addition of Grouping. That's trivial to handle. The key question is shall I treat all files as stand-alone or should I continue to process folders? For example:

- if no "field", use Unknown field

The above is not what's implemented. What's implemented for all pertinent fields is:

If all files in a folder do not have the same field, or it is empty, use Unknown field. This is different from if no field, use Unknown field

Treating all files as separate, (ie. ignore folders), seems to be what you want. Also you seem to want to prioritize Artist over Album Artist. Again this implies single file processing as complete albums always prioritize Album Artist in order to keep the files together.

So, please confirm the following for me:

- The new folder structure is Grouping/Genre/Artist{/Album}/filename
- Artist has a higher priority than Album Artist
- The folders for empty metadata are: Unknown Group, Unknown Genre, Unknown Artist
- Unknown Album is never used as the files get placed in the Artist folder directly

One more question. The new format scatters files. There is no correlation between the initial folder grouping (all tracks in single folder) and the final representation. What do you want to do with non audio files? Moving the files makes sense when the folder groupings do not change. It can be irrelevant when the initial contents of a folder ends up in multiple folders.

Please answer my questions. I'm not trying to make this complicated, I'm just trying to get you what you want.