Manually moving files and have musicbee correctly associate them again

[whocares0101]

I'm managing the music files manually, because multiple PC have access to them on the LAN they are read only, and currently they have a structure like this "Grouping\A\Artist" now I want to change this to something else like "A\Artist".
Just moving a directory elsewhere and doing a "Rescan All Files" did not work as expected.
Is there a way for musicbee to correctly associate the files again after I move them so they match with the internal metadata e.g. play count and rating?

My files are all in cue/image.flac format and contain musicbrainz IDs e.g. "REM MUSICBRAINZ_ALBUMID "36753db7-a19f-4477-84ae-58da939c8df5"".

I just had a look at "MusicBeeLibrary.mbl" which seems to reference the flac files but not the cue.
If there's no other way maybe I could edit this file directly, is there a format specification for this?
Also consider this a feature request so musicbee can rematch moved albums/files by musicbrainz ids.

[frankz]

The only sure-fire easy way is to move them from within MusicBee.  Make them read/write from your account on the PC you use to manage your library and they can stay read-only from everywhere else for everyone else.

The not easy way is to use the "Relink Music File Paths" option under File->Library.  If you have Pop\A\Artist, Rock\A\Artist, Country\A\Artist or whatever.  Remap each of those groupings to the appropriate new path.  That's a lot of relinking to do.  It's really for people who move things to new drives or root directories but leave their underlying structure in tact.

[Steven]

in v3.2 there is a Tools/ Locate Missing Files function that might help but the advice from frankz is good

[whocares0101]

"Relink Music File Paths" does not preserve the rating/play count, although it updates the paths in "MusicBeeLibrary.mbl".
Changing the path from "X:\Audio\Metal" to "X:\Audio\" has the same effect as just moving the files and doing a rescan.


"Locate Missing Files" does only show a few (mostly one) files or just claims that no files are missing.
Now it suddenly shows a lot of entries, it shows the directory for the flac file and the Image.flac file but it can't match any files.
Is it only looking at the .flac files?
All my tags are stored in the .cue files.


I'm using musicbee 3.2.6760 on windows 7 64bit.