I don't recall how I did it, but I dragged a playlist filter to the podcast view and MB did its best to merge but basically laid waste to my podcasts in doing so. Not a big deal there.
To get the tracks back to their right place I deleted the phantom podcast subscription this created, with a view of doing a re-scan.
The problem is (I think) that MB is somehow ignoring those ~25k files as podcasts as the on-start library scan does not pick them up, nor does the "scan folder for new files".
So far I have in various combinations:
Restarted MB, machine etc
Done multiple re-scans of folders
Deleted the subscriptions.dat files from the MB library podcast folder
Tools > Advanced > Compress Library
...and each time MB says no new files found, so I assume that's because these files are in the database somewhere.
I stress that this is all within the MB library - the files are still on the disk. I did not drag the music drive from explorer to the inbox as I did not want to compound the problem - The missing (from the library) tracks are from many places on the disk, not just one folder.
Does anyone have any thoughts on how to fix this?
Thanks