tag:help.beatunes.com,2009-07-24:/discussions/questions/4922-help-for-a-newbiebeaTunes: Discussion 2016-05-12T14:49:24Ztag:help.beatunes.com,2009-07-24:Comment/397490512016-04-28T09:39:28Z2016-04-28T09:39:28ZHelp for a newbie<div><p>Hey Richard,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>What frightens me is that I can see beaTunes has the potential
to do tremendous damage (meaning, to make a lot of unintended or
undesirable changes) to my library if I'm not very careful.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>You are absolutely right to be frightened. beaTunes can
mass-manipulate your files and that always means, you can create a
gigantic mess.</p>
<p>As you probably have read, beaTunes supports <em>Inspection</em>
and <em>Analysis</em>. Inspection is the process of semi-manually
fixing mostly textual metadata. Analysis helps you compute from
audio or retrieve from the net other data that you may want to
embed in your files. I highly recommend the series of articles
starting with <a href="http://blog.beatunes.com/2015/01/using-clean-metadata-to-build-great.html">
Using clean Metadata to build great Playlists</a> to understand the
main concepts.</p>
<p>It sounds like you're mostly interested in analysis. <strong>The
most important rule is to never ask beaTunes to do something you
either don't need or understand.</strong> Whatever analysis does,
it's a mass-operation and cannot be undone easily. BTW: Awesome
that you have a backup! Also, because analysis is a mass-operation,
it takes much longer, the more you ask of
beaTunes—especially, if you keep your music on an external
hard drive.</p>
<h2>
<a name="operation-with-260-000-songs-in-em-two-em-main-folders" href="#operation-with-260-000-songs-in-em-two-em-main-folders" class="anchor"></a>Operation
with 260,000 songs in <em>two</em> main folders</h2>
<p>260k songs is a lot of songs and beaTunes will have a hard time
with it. However, if you have a lot of RAM in your computer, you
can reconfigure beaTunes to speed things up. To do so, grant it
more memory. For Windows this is described in <a href="http://help.beatunes.com/kb/troubleshooting/manually-changing-the-beatunes-memory-configuration-on-windows">
this article</a>. Let's assume you have 8GB, then granting 3GB to
beaTunes may not be bad idea (instead of the standard 0.5GB). Do
this, before you do anything else!</p>
<p>Two main folders are not supported via the user interface. Of
course you can create two libraries, one for each folder. But that
may not be what you want.<br>
There is a hack, that allows to create a folder-based library based
on <em>multiple</em> base-folders. And as it happens to be
ill-documented, I just wrote a little <a href="http://blog.beatunes.com/2016/04/how-to-use-multiple-folders-in-single.html">
blog post</a> about it.</p>
<h2>
<a name="don-39-t-analyze-everything-at-once-without-understanding-the-consequences" href="#don-39-t-analyze-everything-at-once-without-understanding-the-consequences" class="anchor">
</a>Don't analyze everything at once without understanding the
consequences</h2>
<p>When you start your analysis, I recommend <em>not to analyze all
files at once</em>. Instead, select a bunch of files that you want
additional info for, click on <em>Analyze</em> in either the
<em>File</em> or the context menu and carefully choose your
analysis options. Let it run and take a look at the results. If you
like them, run the same analysis options for more files. Instead of
selecting individual files, you can also select entire playlists or
the <em>Music</em> folder.</p>
<p>I hope this gets you started—let me know, if you have
questions.</p>
<p>Cheers,</p>
<p>-hendrik</p></div>hendriktag:help.beatunes.com,2009-07-24:Comment/397490512016-04-28T16:52:19Z2016-04-28T16:52:19ZHelp for a newbie<div><p>Hendrik,</p>
<p>Thanks for your help here and in other threads. I think other
people might find this information useful as well. BeaTunes is an
awesome product. Thanks for running the sale on Bits du Jour. I was
unaware of beaTunes until yesterday.</p>
<p>I'm running a 2-year old PC with a quad core i5 CPU with 16GB of
RAM, so I can grant bT access to more memory. I use an internal
Seagate NAS 4TB spinning drive for primary storage. My system drive
is a Samsung 250GB SSD.</p>
<p>I actually maintain three full backups (one daily, two others
less often), with one designed to be stored offsite. Disk drives
are cheap and I'm paranoid. I have put literally many thousands of
hours gathering and tagging my music collection. Putting aside the
question of whether that was a good use of my time, I definitely
want to protect my investment. And I'm always looking for ways I
can manage my collection better and get more value out of it.
Hence, beaTunes.</p>
<p>Again, thanks!</p></div>Richardtag:help.beatunes.com,2009-07-24:Comment/397490512016-04-29T13:40:56Z2016-04-29T13:40:56ZHelp for a newbie<div><p>Hey Richard,</p>
<p>Thank you for the kind words.</p>
<p>-hendrik</p></div>hendriktag:help.beatunes.com,2009-07-24:Comment/397490512016-05-11T23:38:18Z2016-05-11T23:38:18ZHelp for a newbie<div><p>wow, awesome article post.Much thanks again. Will read on...
Stergios</p></div>WilliamFah