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[hakuin]

"My Music" (~70GB) is currently located at E:\My Music.  I just bought an external hard drive and have copied the music folder to  H:\My Music.   I've changed the Base Path in MC 11 Options to H:\My Music. 

Question:  how do modify the library so it uses new location instead of the old?  I was going to use "Rename Files from Properties" (which will use the Base Path, but this will physicaly copy all the files again...is there a better (more robust?) way to do this?

Thanks,
lee

[edbro]

Go to "Tools" - "Find and Replace"

"Find What" = E:\My Music
"Replace" = H:\My Music

[hakuin]

Thanks, I did this and it worked.  One weird thing, however. 

When I click on my Genre/Artist/Album folder in the tree, MC tells me there are 14,530 files.  When I did the Find & Replace, it reported 14,436 changes.  If I show the filename/path column and click it to sort by this column,  all of the files have been changed to H:\My Music...  so why the discrepancy between the 14,436 reported and 14,530?

[edbro]

Beats me. Cost of doing business? Seriously, I really don't know. Maybe you had some broken links before and didn't really have that many files.

[GHammer]

Thanks, I did this and it worked.  One weird thing, however. 

When I click on my Genre/Artist/Album folder in the tree, MC tells me there are 14,530 files.  When I did the Find & Replace, it reported 14,436 changes.  If I show the filename/path column and click it to sort by this column,  all of the files have been changed to H:\My Music...  so why the discrepancy between the 14,436 reported and 14,530?

Any playlists in the path?

[hakuin]

Possibly a few playlists, but not 90something of them... why?

It seems now that using "Find & Replace" did NOT just do a text replacement in the library...MC is actually trying to move all the files...and since I've copied the My Music folder from E: to H: ... it as now asking me, one file at a time, if I want to replace the existing file....  can't say No 14thousand times... so I had to stop MC. 

Any other ideas besides Find and Replace?  This should be easy...but apparently not!

[GHammer]

Possibly a few playlists, but not 90something of them... why?

MC will import the items contained in the playlist. At least it did last time I tried. So if you had imported and included playlists that may be where the count came from.
 
I do not do much in the way of file moving/editing with MC because things just don't do what I'd assume. Not that it doesn't work as designed, just isn't clear to me why this or that happens. And once a process starts it's hard to cancel.

I'll take the penalty of losing play counts and move my files externally then import.

[Alex B]

It seems now that using "Find & Replace" did NOT just do a text replacement in the library...MC is actually trying to move all the files...and since I've copied the My Music folder from E: to H: ... it as now asking me, one file at a time, if I want to replace the existing file....  can't say No 14thousand times... so I had to stop MC. 

Any other ideas besides Find and Replace?  This should be easy...but apparently not!

Rename your old basefolder(s) with Windows Explorer. Next time you open MC the file links are broken and the "Find & Replace" tool just corrects them very quickly.

You can also just change the drive letters if your OS is Win2k or XP.

[Jaguu]

I found that the "Search&Replace" function did the job properly in my case. But that was quite a while ago and as MC is continually changing I can't tell for now

[hakuin]

Ok, so for documentation purposes, I used Alex B's trick and it worked (Thanks, AlexB!).   

One note.  After doing the Find & Replace, MC indicates it is saving tag changes for all the files  -- when it finished, it gave me an info message saying that 14,449 tags have been replaced, I click ok, and then MC gives me the "couldn't modify tags for 14,449 files....files may be read only...etc." message, which seems to mean nothing in this case as everything was updated and is working fine.   I don't know why MC issues this message, but it seems you can just ignore it in this case.

Lee

[hit_ny]

To save problems in the future, make any folder moves etc within the MC tree. Just drag folders to where you want in the tree and everything gets updated automatically. No leaving cover art behind, or other non audio related files etc. If you move within MC, then it wont get out of sync. I have done this form day one and have not had much trouble. Doing it outside MC will leave things in a inconsistant state which is understandable.

Mind you if i added another drive or some such, i would just assign the drive letters to be what MC was familiar with. So copy files outside MC to new HD, or copy the entire partition to the new HD and set the drive letter to be what it was in MC *BEFORE* the move.

Cue files however are another story...but that may be fixed in v12.