Help, restore personal folder on reformatted drive

[jkohm]

I built a computer with two hard drives (C: and D: ) to keep my data on the D drive. I installed Vista home premium x64 and, with help from instructions on the Form, I moved my personal folder to the D drive. JMK appears on the start display. I created a folder in JMK called JMusic (not My Music) for my music files and copied two folders (M1 and M2) to JMusic with several thousand mp3 files (many hours invested in categorizing, prioritizing and tagging with Music Match).

I installed Media Monkey (which keeps its database in C:\user\username(JMK)\appdata\local\mediamonkey and ADDED the files in M1 and M2 to the library and converted MusicMatch tag data to the MediaMonkey data base. I made a backup of JMusic and the database after making more additions and changes to the MediaMonkey library. All worked well UNTIL:

My D drive got corrupted and had to be reformatted. I copied the backup JMusic to the D:\JMK folder but MediaMonkey can't find the files when I try to play them. Checking the properties of a file in the MediaMonkey library (database) indicates it is looking for the file in:

[Data HD D]\JMK\JMusic\artist folder\song.mp3

I suspect the Personal folder links are\were screwed up. What steps should I take to reload JMusic backup so the pointers in the database find the file on the D drive? Note, changes were made to the library after the backup was made and I hope to recover them. Simply recreating the library will lose them. I also suspect I need a lesson on how Vista handles Personal Folders

 

[Jonmor68]

Firstly I don't use Media Monkey now or Music Match, havn't done so for a couple of years.
Having said that, you shouldn't need to put files in a specific location for a dabase to find them. The idea is you organise the files, in your case on the d: drive, then you tell the database the location and it makes the appropiate entries.
There should be a setting in Media Monkey where you add the location in which it needs to look.
Granted it will need to rescan which may take some time depending on how many files there are. Chances are when d: drive got corupted, so did the database.
Have you tried the Windows media player? it's actually quite good. You just tell it where to look by adding the required folders to list to look in.

 

[jkohm]

Firstly I don't use Media Monkey now or Music Match, havn't done so for a couple of years.
Having said that, you shouldn't need to put files in a specific location for a dabase to find them. The idea is you organise the files, in your case on the d: drive, then you tell the database the location and it makes the appropiate entries.
There should be a setting in Media Monkey where you add the location in which it needs to look.
Granted it will need to rescan which may take some time depending on how many files there are. Chances are when d: drive got corupted, so did the database.
Have you tried the Windows media player? it's actually quite good. You just tell it where to look by adding the required folders to list to look in.

The MMonkey database is on the C: drive and current. All tags and info are there but the files are grayed out. MMonkey is outstanding when it comes to orginizing, tagging, sorting and cleaning up ones music library. It is very slow when ripping CDs but allows more options for file compression than WMP. I tried WMP when MusicMatch went under. WMP was much to restrictive compaired to MusicM and MMonkey is much much better than MusicM was.

MMonkey allows one to scan for music but, I don't want to lose the tagging changes made to the database after my most recent backup of the mp3 files. I would like to understand why copying the backup files to an identical folder structure on my reformatted D: drive doesn't work.

 

[jkohm]

I did the procedure suggested in Moving MM to a new computer at "http://www.mediamonkey.com/wiki/index.php/Moving_MM_to_a_new_computer" which connected the majority of my files. I can now play music.

I would like to know why I couldn't recreate the file path and copy my files to their expected directories and have MM see them on the reformatted D drive. The original path was:
[Data HD D]\JMK\JMusic\artist folder\song.mp3

The path following the MOVE procedure is:
D:\JMusic\artist folder\song.mp3

As I said I expect it's a Vista thing that I don't understand and can't figure out, but, in searching the web for a solution to this disaster it seems I'm not alone. I only got two responses from several forums.

MM is very powerful and flexible, but does it need to be this difficult