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sorting MP3 and ALAC m4a files in library

I'm at a dead-end with a problem that perhaps others have experienced before...and if not, it's undoubtedly a problem that will be coming soon to many digital music adopters.

My collection lives on a NAS RAID drive, and it's pretty rigorously organized. But it's divided into two separate file types.

The first 'collection' is DRM-free MP3 files ripped at 192kps, which was the highest resolution I could rip at when I started amassing my collection. This is the 'old' collection, dating from the days when drive space was expen$ive.

The second 'collection' is the 'new' stuff, all of which is ripped as m4a (ALAC). This collection started growing a year or so ago, when drive space became nearly free.

The bad news is that all of the files share the same root directory. The good news is that no folder contains co-mingled file types...that is, for example, the folder Todd Rundgren/Something_Anything, contains either 100% mp3s OR 100% m4as.

Now that I'm at the point where I have finally ripped a large enough lossless library, I'd like to find a tool or automated process that will allow me to locate all of the folders containing mp3s in order to remove them.

Doing it manually is just too labor-intensive...there are something close to ten thousand folders to search.

So is there a piece of software, or an automated process, which I could use that I haven't yet found? I'd prefer a mac solution, but pc would be ok, too.

Thanks in advance for any insights you can share.
soundgasm

Showing 2 responses by soundgasm

soundgasm OP
152 posts
 
both you guys, great advice -- thank you.

I didn't think I'd need to do this, actually...but sure enough, most (but interestingly, not all - what's up with that?) of my 192kps MP3s sound horrible compared with the lossless files.
soundgasm OP
152 posts
 
hello Hello (a fine song by Mexico 70, btw);

Thank you! I am indeed using iTunes to rip (an ocean of Apple products are a side-effect of my line of work), but because the collection's footprint is so large (~200gig), the files themselves live only on the NAS. It would crush all but my biggest workstations, which are all busy anyway. Even pulling the metadata is an all-day long affair.

Meanwhile, Sonos is manhandling the actual files in daily playback. It's awesome - I love it - but it's not a tool for manipulating files.

So any machine I use to rip is looking at/holding only the metadata. And since that's the case, deletions don't really happen on the drive; they're just deleted in the local view of the library.

And to the extent that's not true, and I guess more to the point, since iTunes is such a lame piece of software, and because this is such a big and irreversible step, I'd just be plain afraid to pull the trigger with it. I never really have the sense that I have a clear view of my files, nor with what's happening with them, in iTunes. Call me paranoid, but there it is.

I'm hoping for a bit of file-management software, or maybe a way of thinking about the workflow using Automator, which would give me both the speed to get it done, and the confidence to actually push the button.

This is one of perhaps many reasons why an EAC/PC-centric approach might have served me better...
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