Here's where my thinking was coming from, primarily to save you time and effort.
If you can change the [Filename (path)] portion of your audio entries in MC to point to their new location, then MC will be fine with the files that exist. For files that don't exist, you can remove those from the database easily enough. This makes automatically updates your playlists (essentially). Playlists are lists of references to the media files in MC; update the media files and the playlists are fine.
So, even though the old location may have varied in the Base path, if the sub-tree (e.g. Artist\Album, or similar) is the same in the new location, updating the base path is easy.
If you need to export playlists, you can do this, and modify the paths inside the playlist to refer to the new location.
Thanks for the very helpful response.
Looks you are suggesting I use one of of two ways to do this:
1. Update the existing library with the new base path.
2. Modify playlist paths.
It would seem that doing #2 would be much easier since I have about 6,600 files to deal with and probably only about 30-40 playlists averaging 20 files each.
I just did a test Playlist export and import and that process looks very straightforward. So if I am doing #2 it looks like this would be my workflow:
1. Export all old Playlists.
2. Delete all Audio from my Library (not HDD's yet).
3. Change Import Configuration to point new Audio Files location in the HTPC.
4. Import all the Playlists.
5. Change the base path in all the Playlists.
Looks like I can use 'Rename, Copy, Move Files/Copy & Update Database to Point To New Location' and put in the new Base Path location. Need to do some more testing to determine if I can only put in the primary base path ie, J:\Music, and it will find the files in the sub folders. That would be real easy.
Any other thoughts would be very appreciated.
Thanks again.
Rod