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[mickeyg]

I upgraded to v21 and I am missing many albums and tracks. Furthermore the results differ form one machine to another
I have over 183K tracks in an external HD connected to a PC
In the real computer (Mac) the library has 123,705
In the PC, to which the HD is connected, the library has 88,709
Hmmmmmmmmmmm
Prior to upgrading I could see, for example, 10 albums for a given artist in the library and now only 2 for the same artist while the missing ones are still on my HD
There are NO DRM protected files
I have deleted the library and re-imported with no additional tracks showing
What do I need to do to have all my albums/tracks in my library?
Thanks

[blgentry]

It sounds like something weird is going on.  Have you done some other stuff along with the upgrade to MC21?  Like upgraded or changed computers or Operating Systems?  Moved around hard drives?

If you haven't changed anything else, I would recommend restoring a library backup.  MC makes automatic library backups every few days.  Go find the last one MC20 made and then restore it into MC21 with File > Library > Restore library .

The backups should be in your Documents folder in a sub-folder called JRiver.

Good luck!

Brian.

[mickeyg]

Thank you for your help Brian.

Indeed there is something weird going on.

I looked at the backup directories for MC20 AND 21 and while the directory is there, there are no files within each directory!!

What's more: I have tried to import a single directory with many missing albums and nothing new happens

In answer to your question, I have not changed anything at all on my PC, software or hardware!

Would removing any traces of MC 20 and 21 and reinstalling 21 would help? (not my favorite option)

Thanks

[yannis]

You could check the library for Bad and/or Removed entries. These won't be reimported, even if present.

You could use a smartlist like this:

[Media Type]=[Audio] ~d=r
or
[Media Type]=[Audio] ~d=b

[blgentry]

I'm a little confused by your setup.  Are you using a PC as a network file sharing device, and then reading those files with the Mac in a mounted volume?

How do you know you have 183,000 files, but only 123k showing on the Mac? I'm assuming the 123,000 is from a listing in MC?

Have you had all 183k tracks show up on the Mac some time in the past?  You said you upgraded to MC21, so I'm assuming you had MC20 for Mac earlier?

About the database backups: It would be very unusual if MC had never made any backups.  If you had MC20 installed for at least a week, I'd expect at least one backup, if not 2 or 3.  To be clear, the database backups should be in:

Documents > JRiver > Media Center 20 > Library Backups > (files are here)

For MC21, it's the same path, just Media Center 21 instead of 20.

Brian.

[lepa]

I looked at the backup directories for MC20 AND 21 and while the directory is there, there are no files within each directory!!

Did you check that you haven't change the backups directory to point different folder?
(Tools -->> Options --> File Location and the last entry there)

Also note that you should check that from MC20 as it has been made the backups...

[mickeyg]

Thanks for the replies and suggestions
Yannis: I tried your suggestion and the smartplaylist but it returns the actual library
Lepa: the directories had never been moved

Brian, my setup is this
all my hardware is connected to a network
on the PC side I have an external drive (L:) that is the repository of all my tracks (I know the amount of tracks that I have because of the actual file count on both PC and Mac AND the track count in MC
on the Mac side, MC looks for the files in networked L: MC tells me the amount of tracks

tha amount of tracks differ between the PC and the Mac AND the number of files (tracks) on the drive

and the backup directories going back 2 years are empty!

[yannis]

Maybe you're doing something wrong; the two modifiers I suggested should return only a subset of your files or none at all.

[blgentry]

I'm having trouble following you.

Let's keep it simple:

1.  Have you ever seen all, or most of your tracks on the Mac in MC?
2.  Do you have several top level directories under L: ?  Do you see all of those top level directories in MC for Mac?

Brian.

[mickeyg]

~~~1.  Have you ever seen all, or most of your tracks on the Mac in MC?
~~~2.  Do you have several top level directories under L: ?  Do you see all of those top level directories in MC for Mac?

In answer to 1 I'd say 75%
In answer to 2 yes

Most importantly i want the tracks to be accessible from the PC
If I answer the questions above for PC

In answer to 1. about 60%
In answer to 2. yes

Today I went, in MC21 (drives and devices, explorer) , to a directory where I know I have at least 10 albums for the same artist (I only have 2 showing in MC). I chose an album that is NOT in the artist or album view and chose Import Into Library button. I got the following
------------
Library now has 88952 files. Search and update took 0:00.

Imported 0 new files.
Updated 8 files that had external changes.
------------

A) How can MC update files that are NOT in the library (did a full search on artist, album, tracks etc and not in)
B) these files have not been updated in any way since they were ripped to the HD

Any solution?

[blgentry]

Ok, I got that you've had a good number of these files imported on both machines at one time or another.

Today I went, in MC21 (drives and devices, explorer) , to a directory where I know I have at least 10 albums for the same artist (I only have 2 showing in MC). I chose an album that is NOT in the artist or album view and chose Import Into Library button. I got the following
------------
Library now has 88952 files. Search and update took 0:00.

Imported 0 new files.
Updated 8 files that had external changes.
------------

A) How can MC update files that are NOT in the library (did a full search on artist, album, tracks etc and not in)

Well, the evidence is hard to interpret.  MC thinks it has just under 90k of your 180k files imported.  In this particular directory it didn't import anything when you told it to.  It also didn't say that it skipped bad files, so MC probably thinks your files are OK.  That leads me to think that the files really are imported, but they aren't where you think they are.  Probably because their metadata is missing, wrong, or incomplete.

Here's one way to check:

Go to Audio > Files.  In the location pane, find the disk drive these files are on.  Now drill down into the directory that they are in.  If MC has them imported you should see them in this view and you'll be able to see their metadata information as well.  Maybe try this for a few albums that you think should be imported, but you don't see in MC.  This should tell us something.

Brian.

[mickeyg]

Brian, the plot thickens. I went to the files section, as you indicated and yes all the "missing" albums are there with metadata (I also see all the top level directories of the external drive)

[blgentry]

Brian, the plot thickens. I went to the files section, as you indicated and yes all the "missing" albums are there with metadata (I also see all the top level directories of the external drive)

Well that's good news actually.  I'm guessing that these albums are missing either [Artist] or [Album].  Make sure those columns are showing in your Files view.  Right click on the column headers and choose both Album and Artist to be displayed.  Then drag those columns so that you can see them.

If you find that your albums are missing some metadata, you can tell MC to import some of that data from file and folder names.  If we need to do that, we can help you get there.

With such an enormous music collection, you're bound to have some poorly tagged files here and there.  Or, in this case, maybe a *lot* of poorly tagged files.  Going through this kind of exercise can be good.  Not only will you learn more about how MC works, but you'll also get to see some of your collection that you might not have seen in a while. 

Brian.

[mickeyg]

Thanks. I needed good news Brian.
The Artist and Album names are NOT showing
I would appreciate if you could walk me through importing but before here is what I had done in the past for missing albums
Drives and Devices...Explorer...."the host drive"... "the directory of the artist... of the album.... then
right click and import to library but of course it did not work since I am missing artist and album
You are RIGHT. I must have a ton of bad files
Gaaaaddd.The tought of having to repair of all of that is not one that I find particularily enjoyable......
But then again there a LOT of stuff I can't remember owning (at one point I had, on top of this ripped collection, 8,500 mint LPs. I knew I would never literally in a million years time to listen to them all. So there gone...

Thank

[blgentry]

The Artist and Album names are NOT showing
I would appreciate if you could walk me through importing [...]

The basic idea is to use the Fill Properties from Filename tool:

Highlight some files > right click > Library Tools > Fill properties from filename

In the dialog that comes up, you can fill in a template to tell MC what parts of the file name and directory name contain which fields.  You can type in MC field names like:

[Artist] - [Album] - [Name]

MC will then pull those fields from the file name.  But you have to get the order right and the spacing, etc.  It's usually not very difficult if your files have names that are formatted in a specific regular way.

Glynor wrote an insanely detailed post about this a while back to help someone else out.  It's kind of a long read, but it's got a ton of details and pictures and advice from Glynor.  If you haven't read anything from him yet, Glynor is a super duper authority on how MC works.  He's taught me volumes.  Here is the thread with several posts from him:

http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=78206.msg531771#msg531771

Good luck.

Brian.

[mickeyg]

Hey Brian
Thanks so much for all your help