HELP !!!Lost My Musicbee Music File.......

[egbok07]

Can someone help me.......I had all of my music in a file titled "music" and it has completely disappeared and I cannot find it, for the life of me.  I read about the Musicbee.bak file, which I found, but have no idea how or even if I can recover my music and I had a LOT !!! HELP...

[sveakul]

Your post is not very clear;

1.  By having "all my music in a file titled 'music'", are you referring to the name of your MusicBee library, or do you mean all your music audio files in a FOLDER titled music, or what?

2.  By "completely disappeared", what do you mean exactly?  What happened that makes you think "it" (library or music files) is gone?  What did you do or change?

The backup file MusicBee3Settings.bak is a backup of your MusicBee settings;  there is also a backup of your MusicBee library (this is NOT your physical music files), MusicBeeLibrary.bak.

If you feel your audio files are gone, did you search your PC using Windows Explorer or File Explorer to see if they are actually in whatever folder(s) you had/have them stored in?  If they are indeed GONE, erased from your drive, unless you have a backup (as everyone should) I'm afraid you may be SOL.  MusicBee does not delete all your music files or ANY music file unless you tell it to, and only after you confirm a message first asking if you want to delete them from the library AND computer.

If your files are really still there (and I hope they are!) and the issue is you can't see them in your MusicBee library, the first thing I would try is renaming MusicBee3Settings.bak to MusicBee3Settings.ini (after first deleting the existing MusicBee3Settings.ini) and restarting MB.  Maybe you just screwed up the settings to make you think the files are gone.

If restoring the settings file backup doesn't work, do the same with the MusicBeeLibrary.bak file, renaming it to MusicBeeLibrary.mbl after deleting the existing MusicBeeLibrary.mbl and restart.

Until you give us more information, those are the only suggestions I have.

[psychoadept]

Excellent analysis by sveakul. If you did somehow delete your files from within MusicBee, they should still be in the recycle bin.

[egbok07]

Your post is not very clear;

1.  By having "all my music in a file titled 'music'", are you referring to the name of your MusicBee library, or do you mean all your music audio files in a FOLDER titled music, or what?

2.  By "completely disappeared", what do you mean exactly?  What happened that makes you think "it" (library or music files) is gone?  What did you do or change?

The backup file MusicBee3Settings.bak is a backup of your MusicBee settings;  there is also a backup of your MusicBee library (this is NOT your physical music files), MusicBeeLibrary.bak.

If you feel your audio files are gone, did you search your PC using Windows Explorer or File Explorer to see if they are actually in whatever folder(s) you had/have them stored in?  If they are indeed GONE, erased from your drive, unless you have a backup (as everyone should) I'm afraid you may be SOL.  MusicBee does not delete all your music files or ANY music file unless you tell it to, and only after you confirm a message first asking if you want to delete them from the library AND computer.

If your files are really still there (and I hope they are!) and the issue is you can't see them in your MusicBee library, the first thing I would try is renaming MusicBee3Settings.bak to MusicBee3Settings.ini (after first deleting the existing MusicBee3Settings.ini) and restarting MB.  Maybe you just screwed up the settings to make you think the files are gone.

If restoring the settings file backup doesn't work, do the same with the MusicBeeLibrary.bak file, renaming it to MusicBeeLibrary.mbl after deleting the existing MusicBeeLibrary.mbl and restart.

Until you give us more information, those are the only suggestions I have.

OK, by completely disappeared I mean that the directory is gone and NO, there is nothing in my recycle bin!!   I have no idea where it went and I did not delete it myself. When I go into MusicBee and click on a song, and all of my songs are listed, I get a message of , "The source file for track "....." could not be found".

[sveakul]

In case you accidently moved your folder of music files someplace else on your computer (or to a portable drive), have you tried doing a regular File Explorer search from Windows on all of your drives for some of the songs, or for example anything with an .mp3 extension?  I have done this inadvertently with a folder using drag & drop on something else.

Even if you had accidently deleted the files from MusicBee in spite of its warning prompts, they would have been sent to the Recycle Bin when it happened as psychoadept indicated;  however you may have some other application set to empty recycled files on startup, etc.

If none of the files can be located on your drives via File Explorer/Windows Explorer, you could try scanning with one of the many recovery tools available on the Internet to see if they really were deleted and if they can be recovered.  A free one that many people use is Recuva, available here:  https://www.ccleaner.com/recuva

[Steven]

also consider whether the files are being moved by another application eg. if you are also using iTunes

[egbok07]

OMGoodness, sveakul, YOU are a Godsend!!!!   I went to https://www.ccleaner.com/recuva , downloaded it and ran a "Deep Scan" of the drive and RECOVERED EVERYTHING...well, it looks like everything....ALL 182 GB's........all there except 5 songs!!  What a fantastic little program!!!  I have one last question as, obviously I will have to rebuild my MusicBee...............How should I have the directory structure setup?  Should I just reinstall MusicBee and then move all the music into one of it's own folders or just direct it over to the drive where the music has been relocated..........??  Once again, sveakul, THANK YOU....!!!

[sveakul]

No problem man, just glad that you're able to rescue the majority of the files!  When doing the recovery in Recuva, be sure to follow the direction to recover the deleted files to a DIFFERENT DRIVE OR PARTITION than the one the deleted ones were actually found on, or else you risk over-writing the "remains" during the recovery process and then they're REALLY gone.

First priority is to safely recover the files to the different drive or partition..  After that, I would recommend:

1.  Back them all up somewhere so you don't have to go through this again

2.  Create a new folder for the files and move them all to it

3.  Completely uninstall MusicBee (NOT your actual music folder!), then reinstall it using the new folder location as the source for your new library when asked during the install process.

Of course, you could use a folder with the same name as the old one for the files, and instead of uninstalling/reinstalling MusicBee just doing a "Tools/Advanced/Rescan all Files" from the existing MusicBee's menu and see if it can rebuild most of the library links that were already there.  But if it were me, after such a traumatic event I'd rather just start over and not have to worry about what may or may not have been recovered to the existing library and in what shape.  But hey it wouldn't hurt to try either.  Anyway, good luck and I'm glad to know you saved most of them!!