Fans Of FNPrg

Hi,

After many years of procrastination I would like to clean up the "artist/person" entries in my database. When I first started using CATraxx I entered artists as "Young, Neil" or "Rolling Stones, The" when adding albums to make sure that they sorted by last name and ignored articles such as "the". I left artists/persons in other fields such as tracks, performers, composers, etc. alone when the information was in CDDB downloads. As a result I now have hundereds of "duplicate" entries...both "Neil Young" and "Young, Neil".

What is the best way to merge the artists/persons? I've tried to manually change the name of "Young, Neil" entry to "Neil Young" and received a message similar to the attached.
Before moving on to fix the rest of the data, I had two questions:

1. It looks as if I didn't lose any information after the merge despite the warning in the dialog box...is that accurate or is it because I may not have had that information in the "Young, Neil" entry prior to the merge?

2. Is there way to identify such potentially duplicate entries or will have to manually go through the "Artist/Person" lookup table to identify and merge such entries?

Thanks in advance for your help.

Hi pacoinmass,

When you merge, if the Artist you are on has additional info (other than the name) that info will be lost. If there is info on the other artist, that info will remain.

There's no definitive way of pre-screening duplicate Artists but you can do some things the help with the process.

1) Filter the Name (not Sort By) looking for articles (A, An The) at the end of the Name. Fix those using the arrows at the end of the Name and SortBy to help "format" the names. It may take a bit to get the flow.

2) Look for commas in the Name to see if they're appropriate. Fix those. Again the arrows can help.

3) Use some method to identify Artists that you've work on. For me, I used the Type field with the choices of Individual or Group (you can break it down more if you'd like). You can then filter out those you've already done.

4) You mention CDDB downloads. There's sometimes multiple names in an Artist record. You can use the Split feature (CTRL+P) to create individual records and it will auto-merge with existing artists.

5) Use the Sort Order to have one sorted by Name and other Sort By. When you have an artist highlighted you can quick toggle between the two sorts to see if that Artist has similar entries in the other fields.

Along with what I've mention above I've created various Filters and Sort Orders to help with a recent project that cleaned up well over 20,000 artists. It's tedious and at times I was ready to give up. But after a couple months of doing a couple hundred at a sitting I finished the project. Yes I still find some that I missed but having only one artist record for "Booker T. And The MG's" (I discovered I had 8 variations) makes for a happy Doug!

And remember to backup often.

DougWilliams,

Thx for the quick reply and letting me know that it will be a slog and I'll have to careful not to lose information! Thx the tips...will be mindful as I begin this process.

pacoinmass