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[Lunatique]

I need help with something that I'm not even sure could be done. Basically, I have my entire music collection on one particular hard drive--let's call it A drive. I back up my music collection to B drive, just in case if A drive ever dies on me suddenly. All my playlists (Smartlists or normal playlists) consists of the files on A drive. But now, I want to use B drive as my main drive and use A drive as my backup, so I need to have all of the songs' filepaths in my playlists pointed to B drive instead. Since B drive is an identical copy of A drive, if I could simply find a way to point Media Center's playlists' filepaths all to B drive, it should be fine. I tried to do it in options/Audio, but it doesn't seem to do anything.

So is there a way to do this? Some kind of batch script or something? Or is it simply changing a settings's directory?

And no, recreating all the playlists isn't an option, because there are way too many of them--some containing hundreds of songs; I'd end up doing nothing else for the next week. I need a way to change all of their filepaths to B drive instead of A drive quickly.

[JimH]

The wiki has a topic called "Moving Files".

[Lunatique]

Thanks! That did the trick.

[user38]

Another way of doing this is to rename the hard drive letter in Windows from B to A (and change A to B).

[Lunatique]

Yeah, I considered that, but that would mean I have to go and change a bunch of other settings in the other software I use.

[Lunatique]

After doing what the wiki instructed, I now have even more problems.

Basically, I did the "Rename, Move, & Copy Files, using "Update database to point to new location (no file rename, move, or copy) for all the files in my music collection. I would find "A:\Mp3" and Replace with "B:\Mp3," and it seemed to work, but I had forgotten to remove A: from the library folder monitoring and add B:. So I ended up keep on getting A: files added back to the MC database, and I thought something was wrong, so I did the find/replace a few more times until I finally realized what the problem was. By then, I already have many duplicates, and they cannot be rid of by using "remove duplicate." The duplicates all point to the same file/location, and I have no idea what to do other than manually deleting them one by one, and that's just not possible since I have a gigantic music collection.

So what do I do now?

[MrC]

You can use and sort by the Date Imported field, and remove the incorrect files.  Add Date Imported to your file list columns, sort by it, and select the range of files that should not be imported.  Hit Delete (selecting the first option to remove from the database only).

[Lunatique]

You can use and sort by the Date Imported field, and remove the incorrect files.  Add Date Imported to your file list columns, sort by it, and select the range of files that should not be imported.  Hit Delete (selecting the first option to remove from the database only).

Is that the only way to do it? But what if I have files that's been imported since--it would be a pain to manually find/select/filter them. Isn't there a better to way to get rid of files that's been imported multiple times and are exact duplicates in the database, but pointing to the same physical file?

[MrC]

The trouble is, while you can group the files by criteria such as Album / Artist, there's no real trivial, reliable way to select all but the first.  You can create smartlists which show only duplicates, but there's no control over which of the dups is not shown.  This may or may not matter.

Perhaps the combination of a smartlist which includes only files imported during a certain time period and only showing duplicates (which you could then select-all/delete)?

[Lunatique]

The trouble is, while you can group the files by criteria such as Album / Artist, there's no real trivial, reliable way to select all but the first.  You can create smartlists which show only duplicates, but there's no control over which of the dups is not shown.  This may or may not matter.

Perhaps the combination of a smartlist which includes only files imported during a certain time period and only showing duplicates (which you could then select-all/delete)?

How do you get smartlist to list only duplicates? Which qualifier is that? I looked through them and didn't see one that seemed to do it.

[MrC]

~dup

See the most excellent (cough):

    http://wiki.jriver.com/index.php/Smartlist_and_Search_-_Rules_and_Modifiers#Modifiers

[MrC]

Sorry, I've been away, and had something backwards in my head.

You need to create three smartlists for this:

  1) shows all duplicates of a given criteria
  2) shows no duplicates of the same criteria
  3) contains two rules: Playlists is any Playlist 1 above and Playlists is not any of Playlist 2 above

Smartlist 3 is the one you'll use to give you the files you'd want to delete.

[Lunatique]

I tried it but MC keeps freezing up and stops responding (screen turns white). I ended up restoring to an older library backup and will take it from there.

Thanks for the help though--it taught me a few new things.