musicbee portable on thumbdrive, drive letter changes for each machine.

[Bigbillsd]

I am moving to the portable app on a thumbdrive.   My issue is that the drive letter often changes depending on what machine I plug it into.   Musicbee is able to deal with the library on a new drive letter but Playlists are not working, with the error its looking at the old drive letter. 

Is there a way to edit them as a whole instead of using the properties of each song in a playlist?

It must be in there, but I cannot find anything that looks like it will do that.  I see relative pathing in library exports.   But nothing for playlists..

Thanks, Bill   

[Zak]

I am moving to the portable app on a thumbdrive.   My issue is that the drive letter often changes depending on what machine I plug it into.   Musicbee is able to deal with the library on a new drive letter but Playlists are not working, with the error its looking at the old drive letter.

It works for me on a new portable installation. You say you are "moving" to the portable installation? Does that mean you have existing playlists from a normal installation that you want to copy over? I'm assuming it will only work for new playlists created within the portable version of MusicBee (because it knows not to include drive letters).

Is there a way to edit them as a whole instead of using the properties of each song in a playlist?

If you have existing playlists you want to move, try:

Edit > Edit Preferences > Library
Change Library playlist format to M3U if it isn't already. (note that this will remove any MusicBee playlist settings you may have had, like custom views)
Use Notepad or another text editor to open the M3U playlist files from the Playlists folder in your old library folder.

Remove the drive letter from the file paths to just leave the folder structure of the files on your portable drive.
e.g.

\Music\B\Billy Joel\1983 - An Innocent Man\02 - An Innocent Man.mp3

Portable MusicBee will know to look for the track on the same drive it is installed on.

There could be a few other things going on, so feel free to post follow up questions.

[Bigbillsd]

Yes, I have a regular desktop version with way too many hours of labor making my playlists to do it over again.  I wanted to make the play lists editable on my home PC and laptop so I don't need to keep doing the edits on an incredibly slow all in one PC in my RV.

What I did was install the portable version on a thumbdrive for now (hopefully will be easier to copy that install and playlists to each PC and robocopy to each machine after i make edits.)    Then I found what I guess were the proprietary playlist files can copy them over to the thumbdrive and also copied the music files. 

So I followed your post and changed them to M3U files, once that was done I noticed all my playlists blanked out the song names in each playlist.  But the properties of each line item were still there.   Then I opened each M3U with notepad++ and replaced the \F:\ with \ so each line begins with the relative path now.   But afterward the playlist song names are still blank. 

I am probably going to reinstall the app on the thumbdrive and try again.   I will see if I can export the playlists then import them.

 I am not sure I want to change the playlist over to the M3U on my original desktop version as I don't what to take the chance they would all blankout there too. 

Thanks Zac,  -Bill   

[Freddy Barker]

I am probably going to reinstall the app on the thumbdrive and try again.   I will see if I can export the playlists then import them.

 I am not sure I want to change the playlist over to the M3U on my original desktop version as I don't what to take the chance they would all blankout there too.  

Thanks Zac,  -Bill

Maybe try these tips??

https://www.addictivetips.com/windows-tips/assign-permanent-drive-letters-to-a-removable-usb-drive-in-windows/

https://www.groovypost.com/howto/assign-permanent-letter-removable-usb-drive-windows/

[Bigbillsd]

Thanks or the info.  I think I was able to get it to work by exporting the playlists from my desktop version and importing them into the portable version.   I really don't want to fix the drive letter on each pc unless I wasn't able to get it to work as advertised.  Thanks Again,  Bill