Author Topic: Major weirdness  (Read 3645 times)

gorney

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This is complicated but I will try and explain it the best I can. MusicBee completely changed the way music is organized on my computer, and I have no idea why.

Before, I had 500 albums in the Music folder on my hard drive: https://imgur.com/n49DVW4

Now, there are 1,787 folders (now broken out by artist) in the MusicBee folder: https://imgur.com/a/oeRbvtU

The original album folder I was using is now shells (empty folders with album artwork but no mp3s).

Is the only way to revert to the previous mode to individually drag each album from MusicBee back to my albums folder? ?

I don't know what happened but this is a drag as I preferred my previous arrangement.
Last Edit: October 15, 2019, 05:53:52 AM by gorney

sveakul

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What happened is that you selected, apparently inadvertently, the option to allow MusicBee to "auto-organise music files", either when you first created your MusicBee Library or afterwards in Preferences/Library/music library.  It's never the default selection.  No sweat because everybody makes mistakes.  If you had your previous arrangement backed up somewhere, you can just uninstall MB, restore your backup, and go again.  If not, someone here can give you advice on how to use the MB Computer Node to best restore your original arrangement.

smann

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Auto-Organise is found in Preferences > Library and then you can also edit their rules by clicking on the Organisation button.

See this image for setting up auto-organise for albums on your drive: Auto-Organise

You can copy and paste this in the naming template editor for ease: <Album>$If(<Disc#>>1," Disc "<Disc#>,)\<Track#> <Title>

This coding will put everything in whatever folder you specify in the "to folder" section under the Album name and then subsequently by track number and then song title (You can change everything after the "\" to whatever you personally want). And if the disc number is greater than 1, then it will also append the disc number to the folder name as "Disc 2", "Disc 3", etc.

You can replace "<Disc#>>1" with "<Disc Count>>1" to have it also display "Disc 1" for multi-disc albums, but this requires that you have "disc 1 of 2" fully filled out in the tags for all the songs on each album. If the total number of discs aren't there then it won't work, and I know not everyone fills out the full disc count.

Click on the "..." under "naming template" to edit these. This will be all automatic and much easier than manually moving everything, plus it'll automatically do any future songs added to the library. This will only affect songs in the actual MB library and not every song on the whole selected drive.
Last Edit: October 15, 2019, 12:10:00 PM by smann

psychoadept

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you can just uninstall MB, restore your backup, and go again.

Just note that uninstalling MB does not necessarily delete preferences. You'll need to make sure the setting is actually disabled.

Although you can probably modify the instructions above to have MusicBee reorganize your files for you, instead. The template is totally customizable.
Last Edit: October 15, 2019, 03:07:53 PM by psychoadept
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gorney

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Thanks but unfortunately I do not have my music library backed up anywhere. Looks like I will either have to accept this new system or spend many hours restoring it manually. Sigh

psychoadept

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Thanks but unfortunately I do not have my music library backed up anywhere. Looks like I will either have to accept this new system or spend many hours restoring it manually. Sigh

If you can make MusicBee do it for you, it'll be a lot faster. You can turn off auto-organize and use manual organization to do the same thing, but only when and how you want. See the wiki for info on organization templates.
Last Edit: October 15, 2019, 10:53:18 PM by psychoadept
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sveakul

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Just note that uninstalling MB does not necessarily delete preferences. You'll need to make sure the setting is actually disabled.

You got me there;  I'm used to the Portable version, and once you delete that folder it's ALL gone.

sveakul

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Thanks but unfortunately I do not have my music library backed up anywhere. Looks like I will either have to accept this new system or spend many hours restoring it manually. Sigh

On the postive side, look at it as a wake-up to keep at LEAST one backup of your data files somewhere else, before something actually destructive like bad sectors/failed drives occur.  At least you didn't lose any files!

gorney

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If you can make MusicBee do it for you, it'll be a lot faster.
Retroactively?

smann

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If you can make MusicBee do it for you, it'll be a lot faster.
Retroactively?

It's going forward. But it'll be all automated, and you should be able to recreate the exact same folder structure if you used a specific, repeatable pattern. I detailed that in reply #2 but will expand further below.

If you need some extra help on setting that up, I just have one question... How exactly did you have your folder structure setup? From the pic, it looks like your music was all stored in C:\Users\"YourUserName"\Music\Albums\. How did you filter the tracks within their respective albums? By Track# and Title?

If so, do the following...
- Navigate to Edit Preferences > Library tab
- Check the box for Auto-Organise Media Files
- Click the Organisation button to open the Organise Library Files Window
- Under "move:" select Music from the dropdown menu
- Under "on drive:" type C:\ if it is on the C drive
- Under "to folder:" type C:\Users\"YourUserName"\Music\Albums\
- Under "naming template:" click on the "..." and paste the following <Album>$If(<Disc Count>>1," Disc "<Disc#>,)\<Track#> <Title>
- Click Reorganise at the bottom of the Organise Library Files window

This will put all of the music loaded into MusicBee into the following folder structure...
C:\Users\"YourUserName"\Music\Albums\AlbumName Disc #\Track# Title

And it will end up like this using my username and one of your albums as an example...
C:\Users\smann\Music\Albums\A Storm of Drones Disc 1\1 Tangram
C:\Users\smann\Music\Albums\A Storm of Drones Disc 1\2 Valley Flow
...
C:\Users\smann\Music\Albums\A Storm of Drones Disc 2\1 Reky Into Dark Territory
C:\Users\smann\Music\Albums\A Storm of Drones Disc 2\2 Merciful Eyes

If this isn't quite what you're looking for, just let us know and we can try to tweak the coding for you for auto-organising. I would highly suggest utilizing it if possible since it's very helpful when modifying things within MB and mirroring those changes in your structure immediately. MusicBee is quite a powerful program and can easily handle anything that has any type of pattern to it.
Last Edit: October 16, 2019, 04:18:50 AM by smann

Freddy Barker

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Thanks but unfortunately I do not have my music library backed up anywhere. Looks like I will either have to accept this new system or spend many hours restoring it manually. Sigh

To anyone not doing regular backups, start today!
I have encountered grown men crying after trying to access music files, old family and wedding pics, and even a thesis for getting a University place, where files that had resided on a severely damaged or 'missing' drive, so gone forever.

Anytime you make a change, it's always a good idea to make a backup.

I use FreeFileSync on my Portable version of MusicBee, where everything is stored in one folder, and I sync to a different PC and a USB HDD backup drive for extra security.
My MB folder currently contains over 15k files, but performing an incremental backup, only takes a couple of minutes, and so worth the effort if you were to encounter a disk failure, or the theft or loss of your PC.

An incremental backup is a type of backup that only copies data that has been changed or created since the previous backup activity was conducted.
An incremental backup approach is used when the amount of data that has to be protected is too voluminous to do a full backup of that data every day.

There are now many free Cloud services, where a secondary backup could be made.
Regards: Freddy

gorney

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UPDATE: Hooray! Somehow I managed to reconfigure all my music files such that they are now back in folders in my Music folder as they were before.

MotleyG

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Very old topic I know, but just adding this detail since it is relevant and may be useful to others that search for this as I did.

A very slight variation to the naming template I have done, to end up with the structure I prefer to have.
<Sort Album Artist>\<Sort Album>\$If(<Disc Count>>1,<Disc#>-,)<Track#> <Sort Title>

Output Examples;
Aerosmith\Pandora's Box\3-09 Come Together.m4a
Beatles\Abbey Road [2019 Mix]\01 Come Together.m4a
Jackson, Michael\HIStory Past, Present And Future, Book 1\2-08 Come Together.m4a