How does transferring over to MusicBee effect existing files on my Mp3 player?

[Xenosagagirl3]

Hi I'm new to MusicBee and I had a couple questions. Up to this point I've only ever use Windows Media Player for my music organization needs but this last year it has started freezing and not saving my playlists and songs so i've been trying to find a new software to use. Through my research i've consistently come across musicbee as being one of the top players to use so here I am.

What I was wondering is if I move over to musicbee will I have to override my mp3 player and start from scratch using musicbee or if i've imported all my files and playlists from Widows Media Player to musicbee it wont effect what's on my mp3 player at all? I basically don't want to lose any files already on my mp3 player as some of my songs only exist on my mp3 player as they are from an older computer that died and I don't have a copy of them anywhere else or end up having duplicate files of everything from before I started using musicbee and then once I start using musicbee it creates a whole second copy of everything.

Also my other question is I read somewhere that musicbee needs a separate codex for mp3 files. Is that only needed if you're converting a file to mp3 that originally wasn't or is it needed to have any mp3 files even be recognized by the software?


Thanks so much for your time. I greatly appreciate it. I hope you have a wonderful day.

[psychoadept]

Hi, welcome to the forum!

You will certainly have to do a complete sync with MusicBee to your device the first time you do it. Whether there are duplicate files created depends on whether the file naming template you configure in MusicBee matches the currently existing file names. You can set MusicBee not to remove anything from the device, though. For the files that you don't have a copy of elsewhere, why can't you just copy them from the device to your PC?

I believe the MP3 codec is included now, but you can check that by looking in your installation folder for lame.exe in a folder called Codec.