I messed up my MB installation!

[MTVhike]

After a few days attending to other things, I decided to restart my attempt to restore or rescue my MusicBee installation.

I started by opening MB and going to file -> Library -> Open Library, where there was one library: MusicBee - C:\Users\Me\Music, so I selected this. The library I wanted should have been in C:\Music, but the one under Users was the other library I had created for my old iTunes music. Everything seemed normal, until I used the sort template which I had created earlier:
Album/Disk#/Disc-Track#/Composer/Artist. It seemed to find ALL the files in C:\Users\Me\, including many which were not music files. I found this out by adding Filename and Path to the displayed fields. Of course, none of the non-audio files had any tags, the only non-blank fields were Path and Filename. Any idea as to how this happened?

My hope was to move all my audio files to the C:\Music directory and organize them by each folder holding all the tracks for one album. Are the tags stored on the track file, or is there a separate file which I would lose if I did this?

[psychoadept]

Before changing anything, I would look with File Explorer to see if the other library is actually still there. If you're not sure exactly where to look for it, you can try searching for *.mbl on that drive.

[MTVhike]

I had already done that as per your suggestions earlier. There are 6 .mpl files in the windows.old directory and two others:
MusicBeeLibrary.mbl in the C:\Users\Me\Music\MusicBee folder - dated today
another MusicBeeLibrary.mbl in C:\Music\Reorganized - dated in October.
Only the first of these two shows up in "Select Library"

PS I discovered that the non-audio files had the extension .dsf and MB thought they were DSD files I had downloaded from NativeDSD, which do have the extension .dsf!

[psychoadept]

If you still want to use the library in C:\Music, hold Shift when you start MusicBee.  Then you can browse to that library and select it.

I am a little concerned that it didn't show up on its own. There isn't any chance you have two versions of MusicBee floating around, is there?

[MTVhike]

There's a lot of stuff in the windows.old directory, but I don't think any program files there are installed. There is a MB link in the desktop of that directory, but when I click on it, I get the same version of MB that I'm running - 3.3.7491.

[psychoadept]

Yeah, I meant like a regular and a store installation or something,  but hopefully you'd know if that were the case. Anyway, holding shift will definitely let you select the library file to use.

[MTVhike]

I downloaded version 3.3.7491 from the MB website. Regarding opening by holding the shift down, what do you mean? I tried holding shift down while double-clicking on the desktop icon, while right-clicking on the desktop icon and selecting open, and selecting open as administrator. In all cases, when I then go to file -> Library -> Open Library, I get the same library every time. However, when I navigate to the .mbl file itself, right click on it and select Open, I DO get the select library question. HOWEVER, is there any chance of my messing up what I have by doing this? I'm never clear what happens automatically when opening MB.

The major problem I still have is that there are many duplicates. One thing I did yesterday was to add Filename and Path to the displayed fields to identify where the audio files were located and, where there are duplicates, often the two files are in different directories. If I delete the one which is in the "wrong" directory, is there any chance of messing up the tags? Again, where are the tags stored - in the audio file or in some database?

[MTVhike]

I took a chance and tried opening up the alternate .mbl file using the "select library" method. The only library which showed up is the original one, not the one in the alternate location. One thing I was trying to do by adding this alternate location is that the default location has an excessively long path - C:\Users\(my whole name)\Music and I wanted to put the music in C:\Music.

Also, does it matter if the audio files are in the same directory as the .mbl file? I want to have all my audio files in one directory/subdirectory stream, not scattered all over my computer.