I wouldn't dismiss MP3 or some other lossy format for use on portable players. The smaller files make the best use of the limited space on any portable, and in typical usage (such as in the gym or in your car) you're unlikely to hear any difference in sound quality between a well-encoded lossy file and a lossless one. The ability to carry around 4x or 5x as many songs still makes lossy formats worthwhile.
I think the best you may be able to do is to better organize your library so that manually de-duping is made relatively easy. Doing that, IMO, is going to depend a lot on the quality of the file tagging. Can we assume you organize your library using an Artist/Album/Track hierarchy and that you mostly have complete CDs in either file format? The final goal would be split your library into three directory trees: 1. FLAC 2. MP3 "copies" of FLAC files 3. MP3 files with no FLAC counterpart You would only use #1 and #3 for your Squeezebox Library. Number 2 would be the duplicates that you weed out and use on devices where you want smaller MP3s. Number 3 would also be used for devices that want MP3s. If you have FLAC and MP3 files mixed together, Mp3tag could easily split them apart, creating folders #1 and #3, based on the file extension. You could even have Mp3tag append something like [FLAC] and [MP3] to the album folder, to let you know which is which when you have duplicates in both formats. Create folder #2 as an empty folder. You could use LMS to find the duplicates. Sort your 'Browse Albums' view by Artist/Album. You should be able to easily identify where you have two copies of same album, as they will be adjacent to one another in the view. I would keep two Windows Explorer windows open as you browse through the library. One looking into folder #3 and one into #2. As you identify duplicates, you should be able to easily drag the album folder from #3 to #2. If you organize your folders Artist/Album/Track, don't worry about creating the artist folders in #2 just yet. After you're finished de-duping you could Mp3tag again to reorganize #2 into Artist/Album folders. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ JJZolx's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=10 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=101282 _______________________________________________ ripping mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/ripping
