Tell MediaMonkey your files are on a new drive…

Posted by Dan on Mar 31, 2009 @ 11:05 PM

I recently replaced my system and in doing so, I the drive location of all my mp3s moved. Since I use Winamp to actually listen to my music on my PC and have always just relied on file locations for everything, moving my directories around is not a big deal. However, when I bought my iPod a while back, I started using MediaMonkey to track my library—mainly because it was the best tool I could find for syncing music to my iPod.

The problem with moving your music collection is that it can really cause problems with media managers—since they have their own storage mechanisms. While I could have just re-imported everything, I have some pretty complex libraries I use for synching to my iPod and didn't really want to lose that work. Since I knew MediaMonkey uses a SQLite database, I figured I could just easily update the database with my new locations.

Fortunately, I find this easy to follow guide on How to Tell MediaMonkey Your Files Are on a New Drive. The guide gives you complete steps on updating the database with the new drive information and even provides a tool you'd need to update the drive serial number in the database.

This works very well if all you've done is move the files from one drive to another (which was what I did.) Unfortunately, if you also re-arranged your files into a different subfolder architecture—you're going to have other issues. However, since all I did was move my main file from one drive to another, this guide worked extremely well for me and saved me a bunch of time from having to rebuild my sync preferences.

Categories: Music

6 Comments

  • Andrew Scott's Gravatar
    Andrew Scott
    Dan, that was a good find. When I began to move everything over to Windows 7, I installed Media Moneky on there. And gave it a test run, and then decided that I should have ripped some of my cd's over to my portable.

    Anyway long sotry short, even though at the time I had a small library in it and did it manually that tip would have saved me some serious time.
  • Dan G. Switzer, II's Gravatar
    Dan G. Switzer, II
    This tip definitely saved me. I have a bunch of sync profiles for various devices and that would have been a real pain to recreate.
  • Eric Valliere's Gravatar
    Eric Valliere
    This was unbelievably helpful in migrating my Media Monkey install over to a new system (Didn't want to lose a year worth of rating, play counts, playlisting). Took all of 2 minutes to fix my entire library, where the 'Locate Missing...' just wasted a half an hour of my time.

    It's a shame the Unicode breaks our ability to update some of the other tables in the database, I imagine I could find some other uses for the SQLite Browser otherwise.
  • Dan G. Switzer, II's Gravatar
    Dan G. Switzer, II
    Eric,

    I can't recall where exactly I got it (but probably from the MediaMonkey plug-ins site) but I found a script called SqlViewer that allowed me to query the MediaMonkey database directly from MediaMonkey. I used this to get around some of the unicode issues in the past when I needed to update something via SQL.
  • Chris Chaney's Gravatar
    Chris Chaney
    Hi Dan,
    I THINK you are offering the fix I'm looking for. I've got a 30k song data base in Media Monkey on my "old" XP. I've always in the past carefully copied all the data ".db" from the MM folder to a new computer and things worked fine. Not this time going to a Windows 7 format. I got some data fully transferred but many personalized items were not transferred. I queried MM and they wanted me to do things I didn't understand involving "scripts". I happened upon your blog and it appeared to provide a simpler answer. However, having said that, I'm a Realtor, and not a computer pro, so I didn't understand some of what I'm sure is basic "computerese"...for example, you start by saying "Go to a DOS prompt". Is that a "command prompt"? I can get to "Command Prompt", but it won't allow me to "change to the new drive (example: "N":)" IF I could get that far, I'd type in "dir" as you direct. HOW DO I GO TO A DOS PROMPT? Any other details for a novice like me that I might run across as I proceed down your excellent checklist that might need elaboration...please!

    Thanks again for what I hope will be a life saver in transfering the literally hundreds of hours of "customization" I've done to my MM library
  • Dan G. Switzer, II's Gravatar
    Dan G. Switzer, II
    Chris:

    First, I didn't write that article--I only linked to it. When the article refers to "DOS Prompt", yes they're talking about the "Command Prompt." To change to a new drive, you just type "[DRIVE LETTER]:" and press [ENTER]. So, for example: "N:" + [ENTER].

    Honestly, I'd really try whatever methods the people at MM are recommending. I seem to recall needing to use scripts to fix some particular issues I was having (although I can't remember what those issues are.)

    In the long run, you might actually find it easier to just re-import your library than trying to go through this route. If you have a bunch of really complex playlists and sync lists, those might be worth the trouble of manually repairing the database, but if you don't have those you should be able to create a new database and just re-import from scratch with minimal effort.

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