Replace corrupted music files with backup, preserve tags and playlists?

[ZombieJayhawk]

I searched and didn't find anything quite like my problem, though I suspect it is not unique. Where to begin...

I slammed my laptop lid down, reallly hard. Color me stupid. The hard drive got damaged. Over the course of several days, a buddy was able to clone the drive to a new SSD I bought, reinstalled windows, and I've got what amounts to a new computer, though with many corrupted pictures and music files. Figuring out exactly how many and which mp3's are corrupted is a monumental task that probably isn't necessary thanks to my backup.

I have a backup from over a year ago, and after some playing around I figured out that since the backup I have only added 264 mp3's to my library of over 30,000. Great news. The complication is that it was not a backup of my Musicbee library, it was a backup of my itunes library that I shared with musicbee while I worked up the courage to ditch itunes and go strictly with Musicbee.  I don't regret the decision but I should have backed it up after I went exclusive with Musicbee.

My question becomes...can I replace the music files in my library and still preserve the tag changes, ratings and playlists that I have worked on in the last year? I do some DeeJaying and would like to not have to rebuild the playlists. They're there, but it seems that the playlists will not point to the replacement files. Can I preserve this work?

Yes I will backup more often.

[redwing]

If you can place your music files at the exactly same place as your iTunes library backup (same path +filename), probably it will recognize those files. But not sure it has a feature to write database tags to files.
Probably you will get better support if you ask iTunes forums.

[ZombieJayhawk]

The backup is on an external hard drive,and I'll likely have to delet all my music from the new drive and copy over from the backup. I've already tried on a small scale to replace files but it doesn't work. Musicbee doesn't recognize the replaced version as the same as the corrupted version if there is the tiniest of differences. So far I haven't been able to replace a file and get the player to see it the same as the replaced file.

It will overwrite identical files, but it is hit and miss whether the replacement is identical or not. Looking like I'll have to rebuild the playlists. At least the playlists are there, I'll just have to recreate each one with the replacement files and then delete the old playlist.

[redwing]

Didn't you say you have only iTunes backup? I was only talking about iTunes, not MB.

[ZombieJayhawk]

Yes, the backup is from Itunes, simply a copy and paste backup of my music folder into an external hard drive.  Therefore I have the music, but since then I only use Musicbee. I am only concerned with the music and Musicbee stuff. I haven't really done much with iTunes in over a year, so I am not concerned with playlists and such from there.

My Musicbee playlists are still there in my reinstall of the program. It doesn't look like the library file got bothered. I'm just trying to preserve the tag changes made in Musicbee to the files since that backup, as well as have the playlists point to good files again after I transfer the good music over.

Not sure if that answers your question.

[redwing]

OK. Now I understand what you're saying. So you have a one-year-old backup of your music files and MB's settings files and library files somehow remain intact as they were. Then what you need to do at this point is to create a backup of entire MB library files folder (not your music files) plus AppData folder that contains all your settings. That's your "MB library backup".
And never try rescanning your library until you're done restoring everything, otherwise you will lose data for missing files.

MB has some tools that can help you:

- Add URL column to the main panel, then it will show how MB remembers the location of each of your files.
- If you want to bulk edit it to sync with their current location, you can use Library> Relink Music Files Path command.
- If they match, you have restored their metadata saved only in the library like play count, date added and playlist membership.
- If some of them match, and you want to overwrite file tags with database tags, use Tools> Advanced> Synchronize Tags command.
- If that doesn't work, install Additional Tagging Tools plugin and use copy/paste selected tags command which will bulk copy selected tags between MB database and your files.

[ZombieJayhawk]

Sweet, I'll play around with that. Thanks!


Except that I don't see anything on the Library tab that says Relink Music Files Path command

[sveakul]

Except that I don't see anything on the Library tab that says Relink Music Files Path command

(menu arrow in upper left corner) File-->Library-->Relink Music Files Path

[ZombieJayhawk]

LOL gotcha!