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[K1lted]

HI

I am a long time user of MC, and have mostly been a happy camper.

My playlists were created in earlier versions (as old as v10 and mayme more), but, until now, have worked just fine.

Since upgrading to V16 though, I have had a problem importing my extensive playlists which has become quite frustrating. I couldn't find any info on it through a search or even googling the issue, so am posting here - please move if this is not the correct place.

I have restored the media library from an old PC, having copied over the music files onto the new HDDs. The drive letter in the new PC is different from before, so I changed that by a "find and replace", which seemed to work fine. I then re-searched the folders to make sure MC had found everything and all was good.

Playback via artist / album etc works just fine, however the problem comes when I try to use my playlists, some of which contain hundreds of files (maybe more!).

In the playlists, all of the files are marked as "file not found". Have been scratching my head about this for some time, but today I noticed that every single one of them appears to have been changed by MC on either the import or at some other stage.  The reason they are not found, is because MC has added " (1)" (or " (2)", " (3)" etc if there are several versions) to each of the filenames immediately before the file extension, e.g. F:\Music\New\George Bizet - Avec la guarde montante (1).wma

Have checked all my playlists and this is the same in all of them - example screenshot available if I can work out how to attach it!

is there a simple way to prevent or fix this problem that anyone can suggest? Recreating the playlists would take a crazy amount of time and seems like it should be unnecessary as the files on the original machine worked just fine and didn't have the bracketed numbers on them.

Many thanks in anticipation for suggestions.
Brian

[Matt]

You could rename files to remove (#) from the end using the rename tool inside Media Center, but I'm not clear if the broken links are in Media Center playlists (library) or external playlists (like M3U files on disk)?

[K1lted]

Thanks for your reply Matt - you're right, I could have been clearer.

The file names in the actual file folders are correct.

It is the file names in the MC database that are wrong, with the extra " (1)" etc.

I have tried amending the file names in MC, find and replace and it makes no difference - the file name changes are ignored and the find and replace still leads to the "file not found" error.

Have now gone through several reinstalls of both the software and the library, but to no avail. I am still running a copy of MC 14 (I think) on the XP installation on the same machine - will check that out tonight and see if it is working.

[Matt]

Thanks for your reply Matt - you're right, I could have been clearer.

The file names in the actual file folders are correct.

It is the file names in the MC database that are wrong, with the extra " (1)" etc.

I have tried amending the file names in MC, find and replace and it makes no difference - the file name changes are ignored and the find and replace still leads to the "file not found" error.

Have now gone through several reinstalls of both the software and the library, but to no avail. I am still running a copy of MC 14 (I think) on the XP installation on the same machine - will check that out tonight and see if it is working.

I think you could clean this up with Auto-Import.  Point it at the folders with media, tell it to remove broken links, and let it run.

It will find new stuff, fix any broken links when possible, and remove links to missing stuff.

[K1lted]

Good suggestion - didn't know this feature, but unfortunately, not the right result

Imported 119 new files.
Failed to import 4 files.
Skipped 2 files previously determined to be bad.
Fixed 12268 broken links. (0 fixed, 12268 removed)

Just deleted a big chunk of the library.

Thanks for the suggestion though

[Matt]

Good suggestion - didn't know this feature, but unfortunately, not the right result

Imported 119 new files.
Failed to import 4 files.
Skipped 2 files previously determined to be bad.
Fixed 12268 broken links. (0 fixed, 12268 removed)

Just deleted a big chunk of the library.

Thanks for the suggestion though

It only removes files if they're not there.

If you make sure to add the paths where the files are now, it'll reconnect broken links instead of remove them.

You can use Library Backup / Restore (there are automatic backups too) to try again.

[K1lted]

OK thanks - my bad reporting back before trying all the options

Ran it again with the "yes, protect network files" option and got a different result

Imported 122 new files.
Failed to import 4 files.
Skipped 2 files previously determined to be bad.
Fixed 12268 broken links. (0 fixed, 12268 removed)
Updated 10606 files that had external changes.

Unfortunately, it still deleted all my playlists entirely (presumably because it is looking for an invalid filename)

[Alex B]

You probably got the (1), (2), etc parts to the filenames because MC had already imported the files with correct names. Whenever MC would create a duplicate filename the number part is added to it.

If you still can restore an old library backup, you could disable auto-import immediately after restoring the library. In addition you could check that no files from the new location exist inside the library before the doing renaming procedure (just in case auto-import was faster than you).

The "old" files will remain in the playlists when they are never removed from the library.