Author Topic: The source file could not be found for every track in whole library  (Read 1584 times)

Abswave

  • Newbie
  • *
  • Posts: 8
I spent hours uploading all my albums to musicbee with all of the music located on the D:/ drive of my computer.  I have been using it for about a year now no problem but all of sudden every track now has an exclamation mark against it and when i double click on it to play the track, a message says that the source file could not be found.  It is also showing the original file location for the track as being on the C:/ drive.  This is not correct because all my music has only ever been on the D:/ drive. 

Any ideas why it is doing this?  Is there a quick way to correct this?  Surely I don't have to go through all of my tracks one by one to point them to their location on D:/?   When i uploaded them to Musicbee they were all on D:/ so don't understand why musicbee is pretending that they were on C:/

Mayibongwe

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Posts: 1733
  • Heal The World
You are in luck because just a few days ago, tjinc prepared this nice guide for users needing help with relinking music files:
https://getmusicbee.com/forum/index.php?topic=41628.0

Also, I suspect you might have multiple libraries and have inadvertently opened one which knows your music to reside in C.
(One way or another, MusicBee was at some point told by you that these files resided on C)

I spent hours uploading all my albums to musicbee with all of the music located on the D:/ drive of my computer.
Though to be honest, I am more concerned with how/why it took you hours to add songs to MusicBee.
Strength and Honour (2025)

Abswave

  • Newbie
  • *
  • Posts: 8
Thanks for the link, but it is for moving the source location of my music eg from the C drive to the D drive.  However, my music has never been moved. It's always on the d:/ drive.  It's just for some strange reason MusicBee has got confused and thinks that it's on the c:/ drive. 

I have actually found a work around already.  In Preferences and under the library tab there is a Monitored folders section where I checked continuously monitor and then selected the location on my D drive where my music library is.  Then it duplicated all of my music library and sourced it from the D drive.

Regarding taking me hours to upload all my music.  The reason it takes so long is because I have so much music to upload.  And I quite often have to edit either some of the track information or find and upload an album cover.

psychoadept

  • Global Moderator
  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 10940
Thanks for the link, but it is for moving the source location of my music eg from the C drive to the D drive.  However, my music has never been moved. It's always on the d:/ drive.  It's just for some strange reason MusicBee has got confused and thinks that it's on the c:/ drive.  

The instructions that Mayibongwe linked are for exactly this problem. Relink Music File Paths doesn't move the files, it changes where MusicBee looks for the files. So if it thinks they're on C:\, then relinking from C:\ to D:\ will tell it to look for the files on D:\ instead.
MusicBee Wiki
Use & improve MusicBee's documentation!

Latest patches
(Unzip and overwrite existing program files)

Redoneter593

  • Newbie
  • *
  • Posts: 2
Thanks for the link, but it is for moving the source location of my music eg from the C drive to the D drive.  However, my music has never been moved. It's always on the d:/ drive.  It's just for some strange reason MusicBee has got confused and thinks that it's on the c:/ drive.  

The instructions that Mayibongwe linked are for exactly this problem. Relink Music File Paths doesn't move the files, it changes where MusicBee looks for the files. So if it thinks they're on C:\, then relinking from C:\ to D:\ will tell it to look for the files on D:\ instead.

Unfortunately that doesn't work if the location for the original files didn't exist in first place (such as when you change to a new computer and decided to change how you organize your folders/files), or after deleting such location after moving the files. This is because it doesn't give you an option to simply ignore the "from" location files in the given folder and just check the "to" location.

I've never had any program that's looking for lost files ask me to locate the the old, now non-existing location, and it's just completely dumb for such a function to require it, not to mention mandates a entirely counterintuitive file transfer process for the user if they have to restore or recreate the old location. It should just simply ask for which folders to check like any other import function.

I had to instead learn about and use the Locate Missing Files tool and then manually input the folder just to get it update the file paths after an hour of struggling to look for a solution (via google) to a fairly basic import function given unnecessary requirements and complexity.