Messages

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Questions / Re: HELP! Accidentally uninstalled Musicbee program with all the settings

« on: June 17, 2025, 08:13:23 PM »

Thank you both for the replies! It's sad to hear that many, many hours of customizing MusicBee exactly to my needs were just washed down the drain, but I suppose I can take this as an important learning experience.

First check the Add/Remove Programs in Windows and run the uninstall for any "MusicBee" entries still there.  Then manually do a search for any file or folder with "MusicBee" anywhere in the name, preferably using a direct file table searcher like SwiftSearch64 , and delete what you find.  Finally, restart your PC.

There probably will also be registry entries left over but rather than wade into that we'll avoid it altogether by installing the PORTABLE version of MusicBee 3.6.  Install directions for the Portable version are here:
https://getmusicbee.com/forum/index.php?topic=40059.0 .  Remember to finish up with Step #7 to get the latest update.

Now you can start over clean, creating a new library from your music files.  Doing the settings over will be a good learning experience to find all the new options you may have missed before.  And because now all your MusicBee settings and files will be in a single folder, backing it up will be as simple as a 2-step folder copy operation.  Take advantage of that to try new layouts, knowing that if you end up down some rabbit hole returning to the last good copy is as easy as copying back your Portable's backup folder to give things another shot.

Using the opportunity for a clean install of MusicBee seems to be a great idea, but after exploring what remained, I found out that some things seem to be preserved in MusicBee - such as playlists, or some custom tags. I'm afraid to lose those as well, therefore I am hesitant to proceed with your instructions of deleting the remaining MusicBee entries.

I'm interested in hearing how to proceed in this situation!

Thank you for your help thus far and kind regards!!

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Questions / HELP! Accidentally uninstalled Musicbee program with all the settings

« on: June 16, 2025, 09:52:38 AM »

Ok, I may have done an oopsie.

As I was checking my programs for updates and uninstallations (to save space on my hard drive), I found that my MusicBee was not on the most recent version. I was running 3.5.something, while the most recent version seems to be 3.6.

Before updating the MusicBee, I found out that there seem to be two MusicBee programs in Apps and Functions menu on windows. One was titled MusicBee 3.4.something. As I thought deleting it won't do anything for my 3.5.something version, I decided to uninstall it.

Oh boy I was wrong. My entire settings are gone (thankfully not the music too). Is there a way to restore the deleted settings file?

3

Questions / Re: Prevent album art loss without embedding artwork in file?

« on: September 17, 2024, 10:33:09 AM »

For the "weird" cases either your album artwork retrieval filter is finding wildcard matches you didn't realize were there, or you have Windows Media Player installed and it's doing its "trying to be helpful" thing downloading album art in the background as hidden files.

Hmm, I have never seen these covers in my life, so they must be from the net. That leaves WMP doing something in the background.

But don't worry, it's fine - I don't think I will need to rescan my artwork for some time now. Thanks for help.

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Questions / Re: Prevent album art loss without embedding artwork in file?

« on: September 16, 2024, 03:30:49 PM »

Most very high resolution artwork is1500x1500 and even the most complex covers at this size are well under 4MB. Ideally this fits comfortably within the header when embedded. More importantly, it is far less impactful on the overall album folder size compared to the actual audio when using lossless formats. These will,always stay with your audio files no matter how you move them.

I have some 4000x4000 album covers that reach well into double digits. But these are few and far between - it is more of a case of them piling up together and taking a big hit on my disk size. But as I said, I have already come to the resolve to embed them into music files themselves, so it's no problem.

5

Questions / Re: Prevent album art loss without embedding artwork in file?

« on: September 16, 2024, 03:02:29 PM »

Prefs/Tags (2)/auto-tagging/lyrics/UN-CHECK "Auto-retrieve missing artwork for the playing track."  All these settings do things, and all of them are optional.

Weird, I have that option turned off in the settings, but I still received some random artworks on my albums. Now, I've also disabled all of the artwork retrieval sites. I hope that this will help.

6

Questions / Re: Catalogue Number tag field in MusicBee and it's handling of metadata fields

« on: September 14, 2024, 04:35:52 PM »

I mean, truth to be told, I've been a MusicBee user for quite some time now (a few years, I suppose), but I never really wanted to dig deep into metadata since I always almost lose my mind when it comes to it. Dealing with different musical formats can really be a pain sometimes.

Well, seeing how active you are on this forum, a big portion of thanks goes to you as well!

Hahah, that does make me feel a bit better but that's good - MusicBee seems to be such an incredible software that the opportunities to dig deeper into technicalities will never fall short.

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Questions / Re: Prevent album art loss without embedding artwork in file?

« on: September 14, 2024, 04:27:11 PM »

Ah, I see, psychoadept! You're right, I haven't fiddled with those options, but now that I've turned them on, it managed to get a lot of them back, although it has picked up some completely random ones (I suppose from the internet) as well, which is very wierd. But it did save me a lot of time, so thank you!

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Questions / Re: Catalogue Number tag field in MusicBee and it's handling of metadata fields

« on: September 14, 2024, 01:29:33 PM »

Oh ... wow, I feel so stupid now! I've been struggling at this for waaay too long. This is great! Thanks, you helped me immensely!

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Questions / Catalogue Number tag field in MusicBee and it's handling of metadata fields

« on: September 14, 2024, 11:38:37 AM »

Hi again,

another question I've had for a long time (beside the one about artwork linking) is about the use of other, natively unsupported metadata fields in MusicBee.

For the longest time I've been searching for the possibility to edit 'CATALOGNUMBER' or 'CATALOG NUMBER' field from track metadata inside MusicBee. As MusicBee does not natively support this field, I've been trying to make workarounds. Custom tags are one thing, but I really want this edited data to appear in track metadata under this field as well.

I've been struggling for some time now to find a way for MusicBee to read and to display this field, but found no solution. Is reading special metadata fields even possible inside MusicBee via Virtual Tags or anyhow?

10

Questions / Re: Prevent album art loss without embedding artwork in file?

« on: September 14, 2024, 09:18:18 AM »

Hi Mayibongwe, thanks for having me.

The issue is that some functions cannot be done inside MusicBee. As I wrote in my post, the last time this happened to me was because I had to change drive letter because it was causing all sorts of problems when interacting with other drives (thankfully this should be only for this one time, so I probably don't have to worry about it ever again). Unfortunately, the relink files and rescan for artwork options didn't get back the artworks either. But thanks for your help, it is very appreciated.

MotleyG, I suppose you're right. Rethinking this whole thing, maybe embedded artworks really are the way forward. I have a lot of storage space left still, but considering how big lossless files can get, I want to preserve it as much as possible. Also, the issue is that some of the artworks can get rather big (I have some extreme examples of them getting up to 28MB in size). But, I suppose some compression can't hurt... Thank you for your input.

11

Questions / Prevent album art loss without embedding artwork in file?

« on: September 13, 2024, 05:10:40 PM »

Hello everyone! First time posting on this forum.

My issue is that everytime my files move for whatever reason in file explorer, some of my album artworks get lost. Last time, I changed drive letter of my external disk with all my music and the artworks got unlinked again. This usually means a large amount of manual labor which I'm frankly quite sick and tired of at this point.

I usually link the artwork to the original file which I keep in the same folder as an album. I do this instead of embedding to preserve some space on my disk (quite helpful for large albums). But is it possible to prevent "artwork unlinking" - to preserve album artworks without just straight up embedding them in the files?

Thank you very much for your time and help.