Spelling Check

Over the years a library collects small inconsistencies: The Beatles on some songs and Beatles on others, AC/DC next to ACDC, a title spelled Lo Fi in one place and Lofi in another. To a person these are obviously the same thing. To your filters and reports, they are different artists. Spelling Check finds these look-alikes and lets you settle each one with a single click.

When the Check Runs

Librarian runs Spelling Check automatically:

At launch, after your library has loaded.
Whenever you refresh the library with ⌘R (Refresh Library).

The check works quietly in the background, so it never slows down startup or holds up your work. Only when it has finished, and only if it found something, does the report appear. If your library is consistent you will never see it.

It does not run after routine edits such as applying attributes, so it won't pop up while you are in the middle of a cleanup session.

What Counts as "The Same"

Librarian compares the Artist, Title, and Album fields and treats two spellings as the same when they differ only in ways that don't change what a person would read:

Difference	Example
Upper / lower case	LAKEY INSPIRED and Lakey Inspired
Extra or trailing spaces	AutoCast Radio and AutoCast Radio
Punctuation	AC/DC, AC-DC, and ACDC
Accents	Beyoncé and Beyonce
& versus "and"	Simon & Garfunkel and Simon and Garfunkel
A leading "The" (artists and albums)	The Beatles, Beatles, and Beatles, The
A one-letter typo, on longer names	Fleetwood Mac and Fleetwod Mac

What Is Deliberately Not Flagged

Spelling Check is careful not to cry wolf. It leaves these alone:

Different songs with similar names. Titles and albums are only compared among songs by the same artist, so two different artists who each recorded a song called "Home" are never confused with each other.
Different versions. Hello and Hello (Live) are different recordings, so they are not treated as spelling variants.
Numbers. Names that differ only in a digit, such as Volume 1 and Volume 2 or Blink 182 and Blink 183, never match.
Very short names. One-letter typo matching only applies to longer names (five or more characters for artists, eight or more for titles and albums). Short names must match exactly apart from the differences in the table above.
Compilation placeholders. Songs whose artist is Various Artists, Various, Unknown Artist, Unknown, or VA are skipped.

The Spelling Check Report

When there is something to review, the report covers the right-hand pane, whichever tab you happen to be on. It is a scrolling list of groups, one for each set of look-alike spellings, ordered Artists first, then Titles, then Albums, with the groups that touch the most songs at the top.

Each group shows a small heading (ARTIST, or TITLE · by and the artist's name, or ALBUM · by and the artist's name) followed by every spelling found, lettered A), B), C)… The most common spelling is listed first. Each spelling is shown in quotation marks with the number of songs that use it, so stray spaces and odd punctuation are easy to see.

For each group you have two choices:

Use this one for all — Click the button beside the spelling you want. Librarian changes every song in the group that uses one of the other spellings so that it matches the one you picked. Your song list updates immediately.
Leave as is — Use this when the differences are intentional. Librarian remembers your decision for this group and will not ask about it again.

Resolved groups drop off the list. The report shows up to 60 groups at a time; as you work through them, the rest fill in.

📝

Only the spelling text is changed, and only in the one field the group is about (Artist, Title, or Album). Your audio files are never renamed, moved, or altered, and no other attribute is touched.

Undo, Done, and Coming Back Later

Undo Last Change — At the bottom left. It reverses your most recent choice, whether that was a Use this one for all or a Leave as is, and puts the group back on the list. It remembers one step.
Done — At the bottom right. It closes the report. Any groups you haven't dealt with are simply shown again the next time you launch Librarian or press ⌘R, so you can do a big cleanup a bit at a time.

Because every decision is either applied or remembered, once you've handled a group you won't be bothered with it a second time. If a new spelling of the same name later shows up in your library, the group comes back so you can decide about it too.

If Another Message Is Showing

Librarian may occasionally show the Removed Entries message or the Bad File Detection message over the waveform area on the Transitions tab. Those matter first, so if one of them is on screen when Spelling Check finishes, the Spelling Check report waits underneath it. Dismiss the other message and the spelling report appears right behind it.

💡

Each change is saved to library.tsv right away, and Librarian keeps five rolling backups of that file. A very long run of changes will cycle through all five, so before a large first-time cleanup of a big library, it's worth copying library.tsv (in {StationFolder}/Logs/Database/) somewhere safe.

Why This Matters

Consistent spelling makes everything downstream work better. Filters find every song by an artist instead of most of them. Anything that treats an artist name as a single identity, in Librarian or elsewhere in the TuneTracker System, only works if the name is spelled the same way everywhere. A few minutes with Spelling Check keeps your library in that state.