MusicBee erased all of genres in my library, how do I prevent it from happening

[9ballflyer]

I had the program "not responding" so I decided to wait it out. When I checked on it later, it had erased the genre fields in 50,000 music files plus 600 playlists. How do I prevent this from happening again, and is there a way to recover what I lost?

https://imgur.com/JPdkOi9

[sveakul]

What specific action did you take in MusicBee before it responded by freezing?

There is a backup of the library, "MusicBeeLibrary.bak", made in the Library folder, which may or may not hold a pre-change copy depending on if MB has already been restarted, etc.  If that helps with restoring tags would depend on if they were embedded in the files or just stored in the library file.  The easiest way back to start would be restoring a backup of your files.

[phred]

Wouldn't it be out of the ordinary for the genre tag -not- to be embedded in the file? Wouldn't it have to have been manually manipulated to not be embedded?

[Steven]

right click/ send to/ rescan files will reload the tags from the selected music files

[BarbraStreisand]

This happened to me yesterday too. I was writing something in the search field when the program suddenly became unresponsive, and when it regained consciousness, the genre of all my songs had been changed to "Blues". Beethoven: "Blues", Erasure: "Blues" etc. Very disturbing. I did not have the "edit window" open, so unless there's some sort of keyboard shortcut for changing tags like genre, I don't understand how this could happen.

I was unable to fix all the unwanted changes using the undo function, but luckily I found this forum thread before shutting the program down, and the MusicBeeLibrary.bak file hadn't been changed since I opened the program earlier in the day, so I was able to restore everything that way. However, despite all the correct genre tags now being back within MB, the "Blues" tag remains embedded in all the actual music files in windows explorer, and I was wondering if there's a way to make MB rewrite all those tags in one fell swoop. If all else fails, I think I can just change all the tags into something else and then change them back again (for instance change alle my "rock" songs to "jazz" and then back to "rock" again), but I suspect there might be a smarter way of going about it. Any suggestions?

[The Incredible Boom Boom]

I was unable to fix all the unwanted changes using the undo function, but luckily I found this forum thread before shutting the program down, and the MusicBeeLibrary.bak file hadn't been changed since I opened the program earlier in the day, so I was able to restore everything that way. However, despite all the correct genre tags now being back within MB, the "Blues" tag remains embedded in all the actual music files in windows explorer, and I was wondering if there's a way to make MB rewrite all those tags in one fell swoop. If all else fails, I think I can just change all the tags into something else and then change them back again (for instance change alle my "rock" songs to "jazz" and then back to "rock" again), but I suspect there might be a smarter way of going about it. Any suggestions?

First thing you need to do is copy the library backup file to another folder, just in case something else happens.
Then, download MP3TAG, import all tracks from MusicBee into it and save the files there.

[BarbraStreisand]

Thanks for the reply.

I already saved the .bak file in a different folder. That's how I was able to recreate the correct genre tags within MB.

As for getting the tags embedded in the actual files again, if there isn't a way of getting MB to do it, I think I'll just go with the "double rename" method I sketched out in my first post, as that seems just as quick as installing a different program.

MP3TAG does look pretty neat though, so I may have a look at that anyway.

[The Incredible Boom Boom]

As for getting the tags embedded in the actual files again, if there isn't a way of getting MB to do it, I think I'll just go with the "double rename" method I sketched out in my first post, as that seems just as quick as installing a different program.

MP3TAG does look pretty neat though, so I may have a look at that anyway.

I think your method will work out fine, but I personally don't prefer to do large batch edits with MB, because if things go wrong, the reconstruction effort is tedious and difficult.