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[shahrukh]

I got a new Vista laptop and am moving my library from the old XP machine. MC12 running on both machines.

My music files on the old (XP) machine were at
c:/Documents and Settings/Shahrukh/My Documents/My Music/<LibName>/<AlbumName>/*.mp3

The equivalent location on the new (Vista) machine would be
c:/Users/Shahrukh/Music/<LibName>/<AlbumName>/*.mp3

Supposedly, Vista maintains compatibility with XP applications by automatically redirecting application requests for c:/Documents and Settings/Shahrukh/My Documents/My Music/ to c:/Users/Shahrukh/Music/, transparently to the application. However, this does not seem to be happening: If I try to play the file in the library (which I imported into the Vista machine from the XP machine without changing any pathnames), I get an error message indicating that the file wasn't found at the targeted location.

Is my understanding of how this is supposed to work in Vista incorrect? Or is MC12 bypassing this mechanism (if it's automatic to the OS, how _could_ it bypass it anyway?)?

Eventually I would like to have all my music on an external portable hard drive, and use Vista's feature of relocating the system "Music" folder anywhere (transparently to the application), but I'd like to take it one step at a time and get it to work on the local hard drive first.

Thanks!

[Matt]

Use Library Tools > Move, Copy & Rename Files to quickly fix up the problem.  I think the find and replace option in that dialog would do the trick.

[Alex B]

c:/Documents and Settings/Shahrukh/My Documents/My Music/<LibName>/<AlbumName>/*.mp3

Do you actually need to use the OS's default location for music files? I have never understood the advantage of storing the media files in a cryptic user specific folder structure.

I would use C:\<LibName>\<AlbumName>\... or similar.

For instance, if you move your <LibName> basefolder to the root of the C: drive (by using Windows Explorer or some other file manager outside MC) the following setup in the "Move, Rename, & Copy Files" tool can be used for fixing the links in MC's library.



EDIT

It might be better to disable Auto-importer before doing any changes. I am not sure if it really would cause problems, but when it is disabled there is no chance that it would remove files that temporarily have broken links.

[shahrukh]

Well, yes, actually I do plan to move all the music to an external hard drive and remove a lot of the redundancy in the OS default pathnames. I guess my motivation for using the OS default path for music was really to backup all "my" stuff (as opposed to programs and OS), all I would have to do is backup "My Documents" (I would even configure programs that put data under C:/Program Files/ to put it in "My Documents" instead.

With Vista, it's a little cleaner, and c:/Users/Shahrukh now gets everything including application data, etc.

But now that media (especially with video) is taking so much more disk space than real documents, I've changed my backup and storage strategy entirely and indeed will have most media on external drives.

As far as Alex's and Matt's proposed solution to my current problem on using Library Tools, yes, I realized that that was an option (and you've confirmed the mechanics of how I would do it ... thanks!). I guess the curious part of me was just wondering why this Vista junction virtualization thing wasn't working the way I thought it was supposed to. But it's probably cleaner to use the more straightforward library global replace feature rather than some hard-to-understand backward compatibility "feature" in Vista.