Sorting a mess of a digital library

Over the years I've amassed, apparently, about 12,500 digital music files on my computer.

These are from a variety of sources, some ancient, like RAM files (Real Audio) which won't play now anyway, to CD rips and iTunes downloads.

If I open up Media Monkey on my laptop in the living room and connect to the music folder it's a mess.

Every so often I tentatively consider trying to organise this but after picking at it for a while, I decide that the task is too large relative to what I'll get from it and give up.

I thought I'd give this one last try.

So

Network Drive\Music folder

> contains folders (artist > album) (not necessarily correct anyway) and random assorted files in the root
> also contains folder "iTunes".
> has a mix of audiobooks, off-air radio shows, hi-res files, DRM files that won't play any more anyway (happy to lose those), and so on.

I don't use iTunes, even though I have an iPhone though I am forced to use it to transfer music onto the thing if I want to take it with me. That's quite rare and mostly happens with audio books.

My instinct was to search the folder for *, select all the files, copy them into a new folder, and work with that.

This loses the tree structure and simply gives me all the files.

Looking now, I have

- A stack of files with abysmally low bit rates mixed in with 24/192 FLACs;
- The same track in e.g. MP3, WAV and FLAC formats
- Multiple copies of the same files e.g. Track, Track (2), Track (3) etc.
- Plenty of unknown and untagged files
- The same artwork on most of the files

So what I want to do:

1. Get rid of every copy other than the FLAC where I have more than one of the same thing;
2. Mass-delete almost all the low-res files (below say 800k bit rate) *except* I'll have to work through these manually as some are rare and I'd want to keep them;
3. Get rid of multiple copies leaving only one of each particular track;
4. Tag them correctly;
5. Put the correct artwork on them

I came across something called Music Brainz Picard. I ran this, but it didn't give good results. It only recognises relatively popular things. Even using the "identify the file by sending a sample" doesn't help very much.

I also now seem to have a numeric prefix in front of lots of titles which now resemble e.g. "00 - Yello - The Race - Yello - The Race - Yello - The Race.flac" , the artwork is still wrong; the tagging is still mostly wrong and I still have multiple copies.

I thought: OK, I'll abandon this. "If you want to do a job properly, do it yourself": I'll do it manually. Open Windows Explorer, sort by name, start working through the duplicates. When I saw the size of the task I gave up again. It's also painfully slow to sort.

I downloaded MP3Tag and that helps to speed things up, but this is still going to take forever.

It's not as easy as "delete all the WAV files" because the WAV might be the only copy. Nor can I search for e.g. *(2) to knock away the second copy because it might be the only copy. I see videos on YouTube explaining how to sort out your music except those examples have e.g. 300 files, I have 12,500. Though I suspect there are no more than about 3,000 unique files.

Since I'm a programmer: I can write a script to work through the folder and knock away duplicates and non FLAC files where the FLAC is present (as long as the file name is identical). I might even be able to get it to look at the tags and knock away any duplicates with the lowest bit rates.

That will speed things up and I can't see any other practical way of doing this.

The moral of this story seems to be: don't let it get so bad in the first place.

Before I embark on this, does anyone have any quicker way..

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Sorting a mess of a digital library