So on Tuesday night I got bored and was dicking around in the settings for my Seagate NAS. It has a DLNA feature I thought I turned on but seemed to never work because I never saw anything showing up where it should. I’m stumbling thru settings until I find a button “Sort Media.” “Oh, I see. I guess the drive needs to parse my data, find file extensions, and build a database of the locations of the files. Of course, that makes perfect sense.” So I hit the button. Half an hour later I’m trying to play a song and it’s throwing errors about not being in the known location. Sure enough, it’s not. Turns out all of the 17,000-ish songs aren’t where they belong. Where are they? Why, the folder My Music, which I found out early on you can’t even delete. Now I know why.
Upon further inspection I find that every video, audio, and image file has been moved to My Videos, My Pictures, and My Music. Not neatly, either. They were all dumped into the folders haphazardly, seeming to only rely on metadata for organization. I’ve spent years saying, “no no no, a proper file and directory structure is more important than 100% accurate metadata. I’ll keep good ID3 tags in the music, but why waste the time on photos?” Well, that fucking backfired in my face. I’m still at a loss for who in their right mind relies ENTIRELY on metadata for organizing. It’s putting all your faith in whatever manages your metadata (iTunes, for example) to be your one and only method of using the files. I’m sure that’s possible for some people, and I know with an Apple lifestyle choice it’s probably not hard assuming you also keep good backups, but it’s ridiculous none the less.
After a night of stewing in an angry, red mist directed at Seagate, I started formulating a plan of recovery. I, being the lazy shit I am, refuse to do this one by one. I needed to find an automated method for the brunt of the work. I was debating using a long series of Linux tools, which would also require a ton of hand coded scripting. Or, I could make life a bit easier with a few tools and a wise methodology for my attack if I go with two Windows apps. One is for the ID3 tags themselves, and the other is to automate the creation of a better file tree structure.
I already know of and have used one of my tools, MusicBrainz Picard. It’s a smart ID3 tagger based on an international database, MusicBrainz. I used it about a year ago to try fixing up a large portion of my collection’s tags which were out of order. It either auto-fills or auto-corrects missing tag data. When I used it originally it messed up a hand full of my albums, but it also corrected a lot more. I relied too much on it’s automation last time, which is what caused most of the problems I had. This time I’ll be more involved.
The other tool is MediaMonkey. Although I could do this with EasyTag on Windows or Linux, MediaMonkey is far more widely used and well documented, so I’ve been able to find some scripts to help further automation of the tagging, as well as it’s ability to parse the library to find things that require editing. Easier automation is my goal this time around, and it makes more sense.
The plan is pretty straight forward:
1. Clear out anything that is obviously not where it’s supposed to be. Since Seagate’s little automated data-fucker task moved every last audio file on my NAS into the same folder, there’s not just a lot of misplaced music, but also a lot of random crap from years ago I’ve been meaning to delete but never get around to. I need to move these else where for now. This was done by hand, just reordering the file listings until I knew what was an wasn’t from an album directory and moving them in large enough chunks to scrub folders.
2. Separate the easy albums from the hard ones. Quite a lot of the music is well tagged since my last go around with MusicBrainz, so most of it should be able to be cleaned up very quickly. MediaMonkey did this with it’s Auto-Organize Files tool, but it took me a while to plan it out right so that when I hit go it wouldn’t make a bigger mess, but also get as much as possible in the right places. So I spent a lot of time going thru the entire library it made to make sure album artist tags were right. Right before I was ready a nice Tornado Watch/Warning was thrown up, too. Had to hold on hitting OK for a while, because if it started and crashed part of the way thru it’d be even harder to start it over. Once it was done I breezed thru it once more to clear out some oddities that shouldn’t have happened, like 2pac and 2Pac folders being made and track numbering not leading with 0 on single digits.
3. Get ALL the easy stuff out of the way first. With all the easy fix albums organized into a nice file structure, I moved any fragments left over to another garbage/scrub folder. I’m currently going thru what’s here (lost somewhere between 500 to 1000 tracks) and trying to clean up further inconsistencies in the tagging. Making sure disc numbers are set right, proper years and genres, etc, etc. Going to throw MusicBrainz at what’s here again, to see if I try and spend more time on it instead of letting it’s do it’s thing how much better the tagging will be.
4. Redownload what I have to. If some of the hard stuff is simply bad tagging I can get around with an hour or so of work, no big deal. But I already know a lot of it is going to be complex figuring out what album it came from out of an entire discography, or why this Weezer album has Orbital tags (thanks MusicBrainz/assholes all naming their album “Blue Album”). So, if there isn’t too much of it, I’ll just spend an hour or so making a list of what I need to re-obtain.
I already cleaned up my videos. They were pretty easy considering anything besides movies or tv shows I have could be deleted because I forget they even existed. What scares me is the My Pictures folders. There are thousands of pictures, many of which have incredibly cryptic file names like IMG0002.jpg or DSC14003.JPG. All the pictures from all the cameras I’ve had, as well as archives of wallpapers, screenshots, and other crap. Not including the image files from old web sites and designs I’ve done. All of it dumped in one folder, which zero metadata. I have nothing to go on by file sizes and modification dates if I want to automate any of it. There’s a good chance I won’t ever touch it. It’ll be my elephant grave yard, a reminder to not trust anything that lacks documentation.
All in all this is a clusterfuck Seagate’s put me in. I put in the following support ticket:
I recently hit the “sort media” button on one of my shares by accident. The NAS proceeded to take my roughly 17,000 track MP3 collection, that was organized quite neatly into folders dictated by artist name and album name, and put each individual track into one “My Music” folder. The folders I had created are now simply empty. Anything resembling organization is gone.
Please, for the love of whatever invisible man in the sky you pray to, tell me that I don’t have to spend some ungodly number of hours reorganizing these files one by one? I see in my future filtering thru a thousand albums trying to place each track in the correct folder. I seriously doubt it, but is there anything resembling a undo button for this action, or a data log of the file moves so I can at least write a script or something to reverse it?
and received this reply:
Thank you for contacting Seagate.
I am sorry that you are having an issue with your Seagate product. I understand that you selected the media sort option and then moved the files into that share. Unfortunately the only solution to this would be to recopy the data after updating the firmware.
The latest firmware revision removes the sort media option box. I am sorry to say this but you will have to manually arrange the files back to their original structure.
Below is a link with information on how to upgrade the firmware on your Nas.<cutting out a link and a further Thank You>
The reason I can never recommend a single Seagate product ever again is simply that I can’t believe how bad this situation is. There is no explanation of what the sort button does, the help files on the NAS don’t even reference that the button is there. The feature is apparently so bad that they removed it from the latest firmware. That means I’m not alone in this problem. The logic of what it did is non-existent. It’s simply DUMB. Every time anyone asks me, “Western Digital or Seagate?” I’ll say something along the lines of, “I can go on if you want, but the short of it: Seagate and I have badblood between us.”
