Playlist dead link replacement

[Strigulino]

I don’t think this can be done yet so I’m putting it in here as a possible future thing.

Background is I just prepared a few massive playlists to populate an MP3 player. Only got one USB slot (Surface) so put all the relevant music on the hard drive from an external drive that most of my library is on, and got it to rearrange the music into neater directories.

Trouble is, the playlists are still pointing at the external drive which has the old, untidy directories. I got round it by making a virtual device and syncing it all to that to generate new playlists.

What the idea was is if you have a playlist with dead links in, can you get it to search for other copies of the same tune - so same title, album, length etc, so it fixes the dead links in playlists by searching for other examples of the same tune?

Like I said I got round it, but I just thought it might be a useful thing to be able to do.

[Strigulino]

Just to clairify - only one USB slot so I have to unplug the drive with the big library on to plug in the MP3 player, hence the playlist full of dead links. So I know all the music is on my hard drive now but it’s still looking for them on an external drive that isn’t there, so I wanted it to be able to search for the songs somewhere else.

[frankz]

You could have done this correctly by moving the files from the external drive to the hard drive with its current directory structure in tact, then using MB's "Remap" function to map the old drive and base folder to the new drive and base folder, then organizing your files into a neater directory structure.  That way MB would have updated with the correct locations.

[Mauser69]

If MusicBee properly implemented the XSPF playlist format, this would have happened automatically - the XSPF standard is designed SPECIFICALLY to enable a playlist to be moved between devices without being dependent in any way on the original object file names. 

MusicBee provides the capability to export a playlist in XSPF format, but neither the export nor the import of an XSPF playlist is implemented correctly.  Specifically, the export cannot be done without including the optional file names (per the XSPF specifications), and the MusicBee import does nothing at all if the XSPF playlist does not contain file names.