A quite common scenario is that you have files in a lossy format (e.g. MP3) and would like to migrate them to a lossless format such as FLAC or WAVE.
You can do this with Helium either by adding the new losless files via an update operation and manually remove the lossy files afterwards.
When this happens it will have a side-effect, playing statistics will be lost for the original lossy files, since their records are deleted.
We have introduced a way to handle this better in Helium, which will do the following:
1) Load the source file (lossy)
2) Migrate the tags from the source file to the destination file (lossless)
3) Update the filename and path for the source file in the database with the filename and path for the destination file as well as its itemtype.
When using this technique you can easily migrate metadata and keep statistics information for a file in just one step!
Invoking the function
Start by selecting the files you would like to migrate to another format. After that, start the Run script tool and select the script Update file type from one type to another.
Since this function is script based you can easily modify and extend it yourself to fit your needs.
NOTE
The files in the new lossless format need to be placed in the same folder and have the same filenames as the lossy files since files are matched per filename.
Example
The original lossy file has the name 01 - artist - title.mp3.
For this case the losssless file should be named 01 - artist - title.flac.
Click here to read more about the available scripting functions