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[scm]

A hard drive problem means I lost a good portion of my music collection.  I have a copy on an external hard drive and will just copy the files back over, but since all my star ratings are saved in the files themselves, how can I preserve them so that when the backup files are transferred over, the existing library of ratings can be written to the newly copied files?

In other words, let's say I have 2 identical folders called "music," one on an external hard drive and one on my computer with MC.  The folder of files on my computer has been updated with all my new music ratings as I have been listening to my collection.  The older files, which are the same songs, on the external hard drive, do not have the ratings.  I lost the folder on my computer and need to just copy the old files, but I'm afraid of losing my ratings.  Any help?

[MrC]

Your Ratings, unless you changed the MC defaults, are also stored in the Library.  Assuming you've only been rating your tracks in MC, ...

Do a Library > Backup Library.

Next, copy your tracks to the your music folder.  Finally, you can Update Tags (from Library) to push the tags from the library out to the files.

[scm]

That worked perfectly thank you.  In case this may be useful info for others, I had 4 subfolders under my music folder, each with a significant number of mp3 files.  Within 24 hours after allowing Windows 7 to add the parent folder ("music") to it's indexing service, one of the 4 folders got completely wiped of all files, and only the subfolder structure remained of albums and artists.  I will never use windows indexing again.  I can't confirm this is the cause, but it's my best guess.

[MrC]

...  Within 24 hours after allowing Windows 7 to add the parent folder ("music") to it's indexing service, one of the 4 folders got completely wiped of all files, and only the subfolder structure remained of albums and artists.  I will never use windows indexing again.  I can't confirm this is the cause, but it's my best guess.

I don't believe it is the indexing service.  Rather, you might have a corrupt file system, or some other program (such as WMP) ran and moved the files, or some A/V software quarantined them for some reason.   If Indexing caused these types of issues, users would be up in arms, as it runs by default on Windows systems.

[scm]

I'm very open to the possibility that it's not the indexing service per se.  It's not Windows Media Player because I don't even have that set up.  I checked all my antivirus software logs and found no evidence of any activity on that scale.  We are talking about 20,000 files being wiped out instantaneously with no notice or warning or error whatsoever.

The only significant thing I had done immediately prior was to allow windows to index the folder.  It certainly could be a fluke hard drive error of some sort (that's always a possibility), but I at least wanted to let people know my experience just in case microsoft didn't like all those mp3s.  I will assume for now that it's just a hard drive problem. 

Anyway, thanks for such a quick response to help with my problem.  This forum proves yet again to be even better than any form of regular tech support thanks to such bright and active members.

[MrC]

Have a look at this nice, new guide:

   http://wiki.jriver.com/index.php/Troubleshooting_Disks