Everything Waves can do

Best of both. When one edition has the bonus tracks and another the better master, Waves can build a single album that takes each song at its best: the complete edition's track list, each shared song pulled at the highest quality available, the exclusive bonus tracks at the complete edition's quality. Matching is strict, ISRC first, so nothing is dropped or swapped, and a borrowed track is tagged under the edition you chose rather than the one it came from. Best of both is the default choice. When you save a single album it runs on its own; across a discography, or a playlist's DOWNLOAD FULL ALBUMS, it follows Most-complete edition only like every other edition choice, and that is on by default too. A merge is built only when it gets you better audio at the quality you chose, a clean edition is never merged with an explicit one, and the merged album shows at its real length in the queue, gets its playlist file like any other album, and is recognized as saved when you reopen Waves.

Explicit, clean, or both. When a release comes in both versions, keep whichever you prefer, or both side by side; the choice applies to search results and saves alike.

And the rest of a discography run. It refuses to start on a partial scan rather than saving a truncated one, two discographies that share an album both finish, and ALL VIDEOS in the VIDEOS section saves an artist's videos with live progress on the button itself.

The characters a filesystem refuses are yours to decide about. Set one stand-in for all of them, or give each its own, so AC/DC files as AC-DC, a playlist called Chill: Night files as Chill · Night rather than losing the colon altogether, and an album titled ? still gets a folder of its own. A recommended set comes with a fresh install (/ and \ to -, : to · , " to ', ? to the fullwidth ？); you are asked first if you already have a library, and stand-ins only ever apply to future saves. Nothing already in your library is renamed or moved.

Names are fitted to what your operating system actually allows, measured in bytes rather than characters, so long titles in Japanese, Chinese, Cyrillic or emoji land intact, and inside Windows' 260-character path limit, shortened only as much as it takes and never at the cost of the file extension. Two tracks with the same name, or names that differ only by case or an accent, keep separate files.

Tags a library manager can trust. Clean Album Artist (on by default) writes only the primary artist to the album-artist tag, so Plex will not split a multi-artist album. ReplayGain tags are written by default; tracks TIDAL never measured are left untagged rather than stamped with a wrong level. Lyrics come from LRCLIB first and TIDAL second, timed ones as .lrc, untimed as .txt, never a fake .lrc, and a lyrics file you have edited by hand survives a re-save. The .m3u8 for a playlist lists its tracks in TIDAL's play order and is written whole or not at all.

What Waves saved

Track and video buttons show DOWNLOADED across sessions, and album, artist, playlist and mix saves fetch only what is missing (a skipped track reads IN LIBRARY in the queue). Raise the Audio quality setting later and lower-quality copies show DOWNLOAD again, and saving one replaces the old file in place. Done labels name their subject: ALBUM IN LIBRARY, TRACK DOWNLOADED, VIDEO IN LIBRARY. A saved album's artwork keeps its Preview button while its save half shows DOWNLOADED with a checkmark; clicking it asks whether to fetch again and replaces only the copies Waves itself wrote.

A done button says IN LIBRARY only when the file really is inside your library folder; if saves land elsewhere it says DOWNLOADED, and moving the files in flips it on the next scan. This receipt is recorded independently of the queue, and every album folder always ends up a complete album: owning a song on one release never talks Waves out of fetching it for another release you asked for.

The library you already have

Experimental, off by default. Point Waves at your music folder (Settings › Library) and albums, artists and single tracks you already own wear an IN LIBRARY pill wherever they appear, color-coded by how sure the scan is (green proven, gold unproven, cyan partial) and one click from the matching folder in Finder or Explorer. Your files are only ever read: never written, moved or renamed. On a share that treats two spellings of a name as two folders, both artists stay in your library rather than one being dropped as a duplicate, and an album that an early version of Waves saved into a folder with a replaced character is recognized as yours again.

Identification is by tags, not folder names, so it works on a library Waves did not create, whatever your folders are called. A multi-disc set counts as one album; a partial copy says 7 OF 10 IN LIBRARY and keeps a live PARTIALLY IN LIBRARY button that fetches only the rest. Edition names match by meaning ("Deluxe Edition" and "Deluxe Version" are one edition, "(2011 Remaster)" matches "(Remastered 2011)") while a live or acoustic release never matches the studio cut. Real-world tag noise is absorbed: accents match plain spellings (a library tagged Bjork finds Björk), "&" and "and" are one word, "The Beatles" and "Beatles" are one artist, and one mis-tagged stray file no longer hides a whole album.

Play length is part of the proof. An undated copy whose track count and total seconds agree with the release is confirmed instead of left hedging; a same-count copy minutes apart is a different recording; and total seconds outrank the year tag, so a remaster carrying the original album's year still matches. An optional MusicBrainz check (off by default) confirms what the scan cannot settle alone, one request per second, artist and album title only, answers cached locally.

Artists wear the verdict across the lower edge of their picture with album and song counts, on search, Browse and My TIDAL, and the artist page says it under the name. Bulk actions respect the scan (its own toggle): a discography leaves out albums you hold, an album or playlist skips matched tracks, and the status line counts what was left out; a single track you click is never skipped silently. Rescans re-read only what changed, every folder you have scanned keeps its own saved index, and a network folder is scanned by only a few threads at a time, so a first scan cannot stall a struggling share.