Playlists are empty after Hard Drive failed.

[HM2008]

Hi everyone. Been trying to search for an answer on this, but either not finding it or I just don’t understand how it works. I store my music and playlists on my computer’s main hard drive, but I keep a backup of everything on my external hard drive.

A couple months ago my computer hard drive failed. The drive is unusable and I can’t access anything on it. When I replaced the hard drive and reinstalled Musicbee on my computer, I figured I just needed to tell Musicbee where the music files and playlist files would be on the new hard drive and we would be good to go. Apparently, that’s not how Musicbee works though. The program is recognizing all of my songs no problem, but the playlists, not so much. They all show up as shown in the image. The playlists work just fine in Apple Music.

Starting using Musicbee a while ago but didn’t realize all the intricacies of it. Been searching on the forums and when moving playlists, I guess you are supposed to export them or something before moving them, but I never had the chance. Trying to see if there is anyway I can fix this or if I am just going to have to start over and manually re-add tracks to all of them.

[sveakul]

https://getmusicbee.com/forum/index.php?topic=41628.0

[HM2008]

Thank you for that link, but I don't understand how I can use that. The individual tracks themselves play just fine, it's just when they are in the playlist they aren't. I don't have access to the old hard drive, so I don't know where Musicbee thinks these playlists are to re-map them. Sorry if I'm not understanding what your getting at. I've re linked individual tracks before just fine, but not an entire playlist and the playlist files work just fine in other programs.

[tjinc]

Hi HM2008 (and welcome to the forum),

Moving playlist files can cause the links in these to be lost while at the same time the library links to music files can be retained - it is hard to say what happened as we don't really know what you did with the playlist files.

So the first step going forward is to work out where MusicBee believes the tracks in the playlist to be. Picking one track:
  1. Where does MusicBee think the file is? To determine this, hover you mouse pointer over the exclamation mark to the left - this will open a pop-up detailing where MusicBee is looking (best to take a screenshot of this as the pop-up only stays open for a short time and you must ensure you are accurate with this).
  2. Compare this path to the actual path this file is located on your hard drive?

Repeat these steps with a few different tracks and you will hopefully see a pattern emerging.


You maybe able to use the relink music file paths function now but let us know what you find before proceeding - you need to be a little careful here not to replace valid paths in your library.

[HM2008]

Sorry for the delay, but I've been playing around and trying to get screenshots to hopefully help. As for the playlist files itself, the "original" ones were lost when the previous hard drive failed. I then copied my backup files from my external hard drive to my computer's new hard drive thinking that would be fine.

So for example, here is the missing link on a file in the playlist



Trying to recreate the path on my new hard drive looks like this:



It seems when we get to the first "Music" folder in the path it is then looking for a folder named "Nick" which doesn't exist on this hard drive as the folder is now called "nickh" on the new hard drive (I believe this folder's name was auto-generated when the new hard drive was installed).

Based on this screenshot the file path seems to be mostly the same minus the difference between folders named "Nick" and "nickh".



If I'm looking at this last screenshot, it appears the music is no longer locate in this folder. And is now located in a different folder which Musicbee does recognize for the library, just not the playlist file. Do I need to move the entire library to this folder for the playlist to fix itself?

I can go into each individual song and locate it and and then it appears "fixed" in the playlist, but I have over 70 playlists and would hate to do this one song at a time.

[tjinc]

So this definitely looks like a job for the Relink Music File Paths function.

MusicBee (at least the playlists) is currently looking for the music files at this location:
   C:\Users\nickh\Music\Nick\Music\Music\ and then <Artist>\<Track#> <Title>

Your post does not make it entirely clear (at least to me) where your files are actually stored now but it is something like:
   C:\Users\nickh\Music\nickh\Music\Music\ and then <Artist>\<Track#> <Title>
but your image shows that folder to be empty so where is that ABBA track? You need to determine this folder path precisely.

You should then be able to use the Relink Music File Paths to fix these links in one shot.

[HM2008]

For the music files themselves, they are located in the folder labeled "Music" in that first pathway screenshot.

So if I click on the C Drive, then Users, then nickh, then music....there are five folders there "iTunes, Music, Musicbee, nickh, Playlists. If you click into the folder labeled Music, there are folders for each artist. So an ABBA folder for their music, etc.

[tjinc]

Ok, so you can use the Relink Music File Paths function:

Map music file path from:

Code

C:\Users\nickh\Music\Nick\Music\Music\

to:

Code

C:\Users\nickh\Music\Music\

The thing to remember when using this function is that it will replace all instances of the 'from' setting (in this case: C:\Users\nickh\Music\Nick\Music\Music\) so if that is a valid path for anything in your library then you will, or may, need to rethink.
In this case it is clearly not a valid path since no such folder exists on your hard drive, so you should be good to go.


After doing this you may need to rescan files (I can't quite remember for this situation):
EITHER
  • select all playlist files > right-click > Send To > File Rescan (to rescan just the selected files)
OR
  • File > Tools > Advanced > Rescan All Files (to rescan all files in your library - this can take some time if you have a large library)

[HM2008]

Thank you so much. I will take a look and see if I can get them fixed. I appreciate it. Just to clarify, I shouldn't need to move any of the actual files themselves though, just re-map them? Just want to confirm so I don't dig myself any deeper into this hole 

[boroda]

yes, all incorrect references to tracks in the database/playlists will be replaced by correct ones, all correct references will remain untouched. but of course make a backup of database (.mbl file)/playlists first. (just in case something goes wrong)