Organizing Library in MB messed up the tags

[Hardstriker]

I had my library across multiple drives and today I installed a new HDD solely for music.  I went to organize my library via the in MB settings.  I successfully move the library to the new drive.  I also removed a couple thousand duplicates that I accumulated somehow in the previous fractured library.  Now the majority of my playlists say "source file could not be found."  I looked and the file names are all different after I organized and removed duplicates.  I want to know if there is a way to re-link all the missing files at once so I don't have to manually do them one by one.  I do see the "titles" are the same.  Is there a way to re-link the files based on the "title" tag only?  Thank you!

[psychoadept]

Have you tried the "Relink Music File Paths" command in the File menu?

[Hardstriker]

Yes, I have tried that a few times and restarted MB, I think the problem came from when I removed duplicates, MB renamed the files with numbers in front of what was the original file name.  This is where I am stuck.

Edit, Now all my playlists disappeared from the sidebar...

[Hardstriker]

Essentially, this is what I am seeing for everything now.  All the tags have been messed up after the duplicate removal and organization.  Something happened with the playlists and they no longer link to the right files because all the file names were changed somehow.

One more edit/update

I used a batch utility to remove the weird numbers put on the file names after the duplicate removal.  So now the only issue is the playlists are still messed up and don't grab the right files anymore as seen in the screenshot.

[psychoadept]

For the playlists, are they still on a drive somewhere? You may just need to change the playlist path in Library Preferences.

What you're seeing for the missing tracks is typical for a missing file. Try right clicking and using "locate" to point one of them to the remaining duplicate. Did you remove the duplicates from within MusicBee or outside MusicBee?

[Hardstriker]

I removed duplicates from within MB, I followed the tutorials as best as I could   .  

Playlists were deleted from MB somehow so I brought them back from my phone.  But they all included the music files with weird numbers in the names (rip my listening stats.)

Turns out the weird numbers were added at some point by some program, I don't know what.  But I ended up finding a unique solution, I used Bulk Rename Utility to remove the numbers and symbols. File names used to be "1-01 songname.mp3" now they are "songname.mp3"  Then I used listFix() to find a best match for the music file as the playlists were mapped to the file names with the weird number thing and remapped the directory locations in the playlist.  So I think I figured it out so far and I can at least get my playlists back.  So now my question, is there a way to perform a best match function based off of similar file names/title tags natively in MB? So I don't have to do stuff outside of MB and risk further damage?  

That brings us to what I want to accomplish now.  Is there a way to fix broken playlists in MB with best match files based on title/tags?

Edit, this has taken up much time for me and I need to go to sleep so I will respond in the morning.

[psychoadept]

There's probably not a simple solution for this, although what I suggested with using the "Locate" command may be able to get whole albums at a time, not just single tracks. Maybe.

"1-01" looks like a disc-track#, if you didn't change the default sync path when syncing to your device it was probably added by MusicBee.

If your playlists are M3U and not MBP, you might stand a chance at doing a bulk replace on the file path, maybe a few iterations depending on how differently your computer library is organized vs your phone.

In 3.4, Steven says he's implemented a "lock playlist" feature which may help prevent accidentally deleting files in playlists.

[Hardstriker]

Thanks for your help so far.  You are right there is not an easy fix.  I will definitely be using the lock playlist feature to avoid this from happening in the future.  My phone is a select few playlists from my PC so I'll see how it goes!