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[tillkrueger]

So, I was overjoyed to find MC today while trying to help a friend find a way to populate his new SP1000 with music...I may very well have found my music management solution for life...truly amazing piece of software that is so deep that I found myself discovering new things by the minute and whining in joy.

Everything was going great...I initially set up an auto-import folder called "Lossless" into which I placed all of my Hi-Res FLAC files, and as I added more, I would see the MC database update a few minutes later...very cool.

I did a bunch of improvements to the tags, moved a number of CDs into different genres, renamed genres and combined a few, and so on...your regular media management stuff...all while listening to the unbelievable output quality of this beauty.

Well, just before midnight, tired from a day of working on this, it occurred to me that I also had a huge collection of regular lossless files, some of them FLAC, others ALAC, and that I would want to actually have them in sub-folders, like Lossless/Hi-Res, Lossless/FLAC, Lossless/ALAC, etc. Just like I manage them on my local drives and arrays.

And this is where I messed up. I figured that if I quit MC, created the Lossless/Hi-Res folder, and then moved all of my added music into the Hi-Res folder, MC would then see the change and update the file paths upon starting my next session. Only it didn't...it started doubling all the files and I kinda panicked, thought that if I just delete all files within MC right quick, it will then start auto-importing just the files that are now in the new location, and rebuild the library anew...nope.

Ok, so I force-quit MC, started it again, and proceeded to set up the auto-import from scratch and let it search the new folder tree. It didn't, mostly because it remembered me deleting all the files and thus did this:

Library now has 2 files. Search and update took 0:01.

Imported 178 new files.
Fixed 3590 broken links. (0 fixed, 3590 removed)
Updated 2 files that had external changes.
Skipped 2024 files (previously deleted from library).
Skipped 2 files (previously determined to be bad).

So after this long-winded setup, my question is this: how do I start from scratch and get MC to do what it did when I first started...delete everything in the Application Support folder for MC and re-install the application, then start again? I guess I lost the tagging and re-arranging work that I did, right? but it's very early in my library building process, so I can live with that.

Hope that the community can get me back on my way, and maybe tell me how - in the future - I should deal with folders I might have to move due to a more refined file-management on my drive(s), or trying to get the library to work on another computer.

[Hendrik]

You can use File -> Library -> Clear Library to start fresh and remove all data about your media files (the files themselves won't be touched).
After that it should import any files again just like new.

[tillkrueger]

Thanks, Hendrik, that sounds easy enough. I shall try that first thing tomorrow morning, over coffee

G‘nite everyone.

[JimH]

You could also try, instead, restoring a backup.  MC makes them automatically.  You might get lucky.

Tags may be stored in the files.  It depends on how you have MC set.  You can also move them to the files with the Library Tool called Update Tags from Library.

[tillkrueger]

I had already cleared my Library, JimH, but will keep that in mind should I ever run into such a situation again. After clearing the Library and setting up my Auto-Import folder again, it took all but 20 minutes to get back to where I was yesterday, minus the tag changes, which shouldn't take me very long, so I'm good for now.

I do have more questions, pertaining to keeping a consistent columns layout throughout the entire MC UI (it seems they always revert back to their default layout, even after saving a View), but I should probably start a new topic as not to run off-track for this one...or maybe it's been covered many times already, or is detailed in the Wiki...I'll check there too.