Library issues with renaming of drive volumes/directories

[Scary Guy]

So I have two drives that I use as mirrors of one another.  One is in Ext4 which I primarily work out of under Ubuntu and the other is NTFS for Windows which only gets used with VirtualDJ (haven't gotten used to MIXX yet and it does video.)

Anyway I had them named Expansion Drive and Expansion Backup.  I figured a more logical naming would be in order so I renamed Expansion Backup to Ext4 2GB.  Well I loaded up gmusicbrowser and it couldn't find anything because it was still going off the old volume name.  I renamed it back and all was good again.  However this does highlight a problem.

I had a similar issue when moving all of my music out of /m(for media)/Music to just /m (because on NTFS I was hitting the character limit on some directories/files.) Then it didn't know where my music was even though it was just one directory up.  Obviously I didn't want to put it back so I had to reload the entire library.  (This was before I copied everything to the new drive.)

My point is there should be a way to go in (through the program itself) and modify the library location volume and directory.  If there is one I didn't see it.

[Satoshi]

Your best bet is either using the "Reorganize files and folders" in the settings dialog or simply replacing text in gmbrc with your favorite editor or scripting language.

There should be a better way to do this, though. Do you have any suggestions how it should be done?

[Quentin Sculo]

The best way to do that currently is by a simple search and replace, see "How do I move my music to a new folder ?" in the faq : http://gmusicbrowser.org/faq.html
As mentioned in the answer, a symlink is the best way to deal with this, by avoiding the problem in the first place.

Another way, which didn't work in v1.1.x, only fixed it yesterday in git, so you probably can't do that yet, is removing all the songs from the library, and scan the new folder. I'm working on improve that so you don't have to remove the songs first. Still the cover-album associations you may have set for albums will be lost, gmb will auto-select the covers from scratch.

If it is just about renaming the folder, you can do that from inside gmb, in a "folder" tab, the covers association should be kept. But you can't currently move a folder this way (though I always planned to add this).

It's true the situation could be improved, how do other players deal with this btw ?

[Scary Guy]

I swear I looked at the FAQ lol.  I guess I didn't expect it to be so close to the top.

Most of the other linux based music libraries seem to make you reload the entire library as well.

As I said I'm a recent windows convert, and I used a player which had a few options for reading tags on songs.  Since I use filenames to sort songs and don't really use the tags I had it set to only read the tag/file length when the file was played.  I don't use album art which speeds things up as well.  Reloading my entire music from scratch took about 30 seconds to a minute total.  It could also read all the tags, or just the tags for all the displayed files on the screen.

This was especially useful because I'd get libraries from my friends too and slowly integrate them into my own.  When I'd make major changes I could just dump and reload the database from scratch.

[Scary Guy]

I just had a thought and this would probably be best practice.

Virtual DJ uses databases stored on the drive with the media.  If a drive is plugged in it will read that database and add it to the library along with all the information almost instantly.

I don't know why I didn't mention it before, it just makes so much sense!