My PC broke and I never got round to backing up my old music collection. Luckily it was on an iPod so I used Mediamonkey to retrieve it and transfer it from my iPod over to my new PC.
For some reason there are 8 less songs in my music folder, and another one less on Mediamonkey than what my iPod says (So 3 different places telling me 3 different amounts of tracks). I’m not sure whether iTunes was bugging or if I really have lost 8 or 9 songs. Maybe copying thousands of tracks over at once messed up some files? I have no idea. I seem to remember this always happening after transferring so many things at once, why? I am the type of person who spends forever organizing their music and it’s bothering me.
Now as there’s no actual files in my iTunes the only way I can view music on it is if I connect my iPod, but you can’t sort by artist/song etc… for whatever reason. It is stuck on sorted by date added, which is useless as my iPod and Mediamonkey show different dates. I’d have to spend days going down the entire list and search them up on Mediamonkey one by one to see if they’re there, rather than click artist or song name and skim down the list (still slow but far easier). I don’t think I can sync my iPod to iTunes either because it would just wipe my iPod clean?
Surely there’s a better way to do this?
rsync -n -av --delete source_directory/ destination_directory/
Here’s a breakdown of the command options:
-n or --dry-run: This option simulates the operation without making any changes, which is useful for seeing what files are missing in the destination.
-av: This combines -a (archive, which preserves almost all file attributes and copies directories recursively) and -v (verbose, to provide detailed output).
–delete: This option shows which files would be deleted in the destination directory to make it match the source. Since we are using --dry-run, no files will actually be deleted.
This command will output a list of files that are present in the source but missing in the destination, as well as files that would be deleted in the destination to match the source.
Remember to replace source_directory/ and destination_directory/ with your actual directory paths.
In this situation I’ve used command prompt to help!
Navigate to each folder in turn and…
Dir /b > file1.csv
Dir /b > file2.csv
Add a /s if there’s subfolders to check
Load these up in excel or equivalent and run a comparison through sorting or a countif function
Whatever you use, be sure to a CRC and generate a HASH (and ideally save it for future reference) to ensure you copies are bit for bit accurate. This is especially critical for audio files where a split second glitch will haunt you forever!