Author Topic: custom tag information not showing up when I moved PCs  (Read 1000 times)

tom

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So I'm kinda confused, I don't remember this happening when I switched everything over to my other laptop a few months ago. That laptop failed and here I am with a new laptop, but my old old laptop still works so I decided to get back MusicBee from that laptop. Despite drive letter and folder path discrepancies I got most of everything working, it can detect my old playlists, songs. etc. Even my custom tags have been successfully transferred which I was glad to see! That being said the information inside the custom tags is not showing up. Funny enough the information inside the Mood tags has been saved but not any for my custom tags even though I'm very sure I did a few songs back on my old laptop. Anyone know of a way to get this info back without having to manually copy it over? As that'd obviously take forever lol.

And yes I realize and have read a similar thread posted months back and someone said the tag information is stored inside the .mbl file which I have confirmed has been copied over. But I still see none of the tag information itself. I can understand embedding the information in the music file itself as opposed to the MB database but the same person also said that's a big ordeal and I'd prefer to avoid that if I can, besides I don't even know if I was forced to do that if I'd have enough unused custom tag slots available to do that and create new custom tags embedded in the music files.

As said before I don't remember this happening when I switched over from my oldest laptop to my previous laptop a few months back and I obviously didn't have to ask for help then, so I don't know what I'm missing now.

Anybody have any ideas? Thanks in advance.

EDIT: worth noting that I checked the .mbl file and the last time it has been modified is in fact back in 2018 when I was still using the old laptop so I know that should have the custom tag information. Yet it apparently doesn't.....
Last Edit: April 18, 2019, 09:14:37 AM by tom

sveakul

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tom

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Thanks, but tried that and restarted twice, then tried to rescan once more for good measure, to no avail.

Any other ideas?

EDIT: worth noting that I checked the .mbl file and the last time it has been modified is in fact back in 2018 when I was still using the old laptop so I know that should have the custom tag information. Yet it apparently doesn't.....
Last Edit: April 18, 2019, 09:14:20 AM by tom

psychoadept

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I'm not clear on whether these tags were saved to the database only or actually to the files. Rescanning will only help if they're in the files.
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frankz

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Isn't the mbl updated every time you close MB. It's it possible you're not opening the library you think you are?

tom

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Thanks for your help guys, got everything working again. Got all my playlists back and the information in my custom tags.

Thanks @frankz for your suggestion, I don't know why but I never thought about the possibility before of it updating everytime MB was closed because that makes sense. I actually had 2 seperate copies of my library, one in my C drive and another in my D drive (my old laptop didn't have 2 separate drives, my new one does). MB was using the one in the C drive which I assume didn't have the information the good old one in my D drive did. I couldn't figure out how to relink the library to use the D drive instead (and didn't want to because the C drive had all my playlists stored in it which was its own big ordeal to fix, but I managed to do it on my own) so I just copied the .mbl and mbl .bak files over to the C drive. This however only worked partially as all the files became unlinked from their original locations again to the old drive, which was understandable, however they did have the custom tag information in them unlike the previous files. Tried relinking and rescanning to no avail, they were still unavailable, and actually MB ended up making duplicates of every single file in my library. When managing those duplicates it was split about half and half between the old linked files and the new linked files which worked but did not have the tag info in them. I was frustrated and to be honest almost was tempted to uninstall MB and install again with a clean slate, before remembering I made a backup of my library (yay me!) so copied that whole library into the current "corrupted" library and all of the files worked again, none having the tag information (the unplayable C: linked files from the old laptop had the tag information while the correctly linked D: linked ones didn't but were playable). I ended up copying every library file from the D drive onto the C drive except the playlist files which would have been lost otherwise, due to the D drive not having the playlist files, and it was likely they would have been gone forever if I'd done this and not backed it up beforehand, which come to think of it I did. A dialog popped up when I clicked on the MusicBee icon again asking me to relink the music files (interesting to note, there was two, I'm assuming for both the library management folder and the library folder itself which I kept. The music library itself defaulted to C:\Users\(old name) to C:\Users\(new name) (the two laptops had different default usernames on them) but I had to change this to D:\, but what's interesting to note is that typing it in did not work and for whatever reason said that was an invalid file path. So I actually had to click the dots and click on the D drive that way. I left the library management folder as is since those file paths looked correct (C:\Users\(old name)\Music\MusicBee I think to C:\Users\(new name)\Music\MusicBee which was correct as I decided to leave the library management folder in the C drive). Clicked OK and everything to my surprise worked, all files are playable and those which had the custom tag information have retained them, even those which have custom tag information in the playlists are playable and have the tag information, no duplicates no nothing! And yes the playlists still work.

Thought I'd write out this detailed description if any devs would find it useful, or anybody experiencing similar problems to me might be able to benefit from this description. Thanks for all your help!