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I'm about to move all of my music into another folder called Music, and I've spent a lot of time organizing the metadata of it. When I move the music into another folder, will my custom metadata be lost?

I'm running Banshee 2.0.1 on Ubuntu Lucid.

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  • Did you set the metadata using Banshee? In Edit > Preferences, have you set "Write metadata to files"? Jun 2, 2011 at 0:06
  • Yes, and no. But I just now checked it. Jun 2, 2011 at 0:08
  • Now that I've checked it, can I safely move my music? Will it apply to all past metadata changes I've made? Jun 2, 2011 at 0:54
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    Yeah, that was the part I'm not sure about. When you check that box, I can't remember if it automatically goes through all the songs and writes the metadata to the file. Either way, it might not matter. It's possible that when you re-import a song into your library, Banshee will recognize it and apply the metadata saved in the database, but I can't remember if that's the case either. Jun 2, 2011 at 11:14
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    I moved one album after checking that box, and it kept the metadata, so I moved everything else and the metadata was kept. Based on this, it's pretty safe to assume that by checking the box, it applies all of the changes you've made to the file. Thanks for your help. Jun 2, 2011 at 13:07

2 Answers 2

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I had my music collection under /data/music and wanted to move it to /media/SD/music. I did the following:

cd ~/.config/banshee-1
sqlite3 banshee.db ".dump" > dump
mv banshee.db banshee.db.backup
sed -i 's+file:///data/music/+file:///home/marc/Music/+g' dump
cat dump | sqlite3 banshee.db
rmdir ~/Music
ln -s /media/SD/music ~/Music

Here is an explanation of what I did:

  1. Go to the directory holding the Banshee database.
  2. Dump the contents of the database into a text file.
  3. Rename the old data base to a backup (in case something goes wrong).
  4. Replace file:///data/music/ with file:///home/marc/Music in the DB dump.
  5. Convert the updated DB dump back into a new banshee.db file. 6.Get rid of the unused ~/Music" directory.
  6. Create a symlink to /media/SD/music from ~/Music.

The result is that I removed the standard ~/Music directory and created a symlink to the actual directory where I store my music files. I told the Banshee database to look for my music in the location of the symlink. If I ever want to change the location of my music again, all I have to do is move my files and update the location of the symlink.

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I have moved my Music from one system to another and I have also moved from one LVM to another LVM.

One move I completed was an scp from my laptop (Ubuntu) to my desktop (Windows) and all the information including the metadata of each of my songs were great.

I then did another copy from LVM volume to another LVM volume using the following command:

sudo cp -a ./Music/* /mnt/tmpMusic/

I am using that new copied Music folder for Banshee as we speak with no metadata problems.

Before you move all your music from one folder to another, just do a small test for one song move to a new directory. Once the song has been moved, import it back into Banshee to verify that the metadata is not harmed. Example below:

sudo cp -a /path/to/current/song.mp3 /new/path/to/song.mp3

Hope this helps.

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