relinking files

[hiccup]

I've only done some speed reading on the development of this thread. And I used one eye.
So, please do not take this as a thorough analysis of your specific challenges and me providing the magical solution here.

It looks like the efforts of other experienced members to help you, and the steps they provided you with that might solve the issue are problematic to accomplish.
That's quite understandable, this all is far from an obvious and easy matter.

To explain a bit about my personal viewpoint:
I don't care about play counts, I don't care much about anything that is not stored within my music files themselves.
So I make sure my music files and folders are backed up well. If Satan takes control of my MusicBee I'll send him back to the oven and start with a brand new MusicBee installation without crying much.

So, why not just create a new MusicBee library, and have it scan the folders where all your music files are residing?
Any tags they contain and you have carefully edited over the year(s) will be there.

Am I missing much here?

[JBD779]

I've only done some speed reading on the development of this thread. And I used one eye.
So, please do not take this as a thorough analysis of your specific challenges and me providing the magical solution here.

It looks like the efforts of other experienced members to help you, and the steps they provided you with that might solve the issue are problematic to accomplish.
That's quite understandable, this all is far from an obvious and easy matter.

To explain a bit about my personal viewpoint:
I don't care about play counts, I don't care much about anything that is not stored within my music files themselves.
So I make sure my music files and folders are backed up well. If Satan takes control of my MusicBee I'll send him back to the oven and start with a brand new MusicBee installation without crying much.

So, why not just create a new MusicBee library, and have it scan the folders where all your music files are residing?
Any tags they contain and you have carefully edited over the year(s) will be there.

Am I missing much here?

Thanks, no you're not missing much and that is what I decided to do. Like yourself the important thing to me is the music files, the rest is just extras. After doing the new library all the tags/edits are in place but of course now I've lost the playlists and the playcount data and while that's frustrating its not the end of the world. I can create new playlists, it's just time consuming and playcounts are just a statistic and pretty meaningless at that. Thanks again, have a great day. Rgds JE

[sveakul]

After doing the new library all the tags/edits are in place but of course now I've lost the playlists

Your playlists are all in your original library folder in a subfolder named "Playlists" (unless you told MB to store them elsewhere), all of them as individual files with either a *.mbp or *.m3u extension depending on how you imported them.  Just copy all of them into your new Playlists folder in your new Library folder and you've got them all back.  They will however have the original file paths of your music files--if those have changed, open up the playlists in a text editor and do a Find/Replace to reflect the new paths.