[jac55]

I want to change the Location where my music library is stored. ATM my music has been added from 3 locations, 2 internal hard drive locations, and a portable attached hard drive. My new library will be in one place on a bigger portable hard drive.

Any ideas on how I can achieve this without rescraping?

If it helps I can keep the folder structure as identical as possible, for example my new location parent folder, can contain the original location1, location2, and location3

[tjay260476]

If the folders are shared from another device, just simply keep to the shared folder structure. Kodi won’t know the difference, neither will the database, either the local one or a MySQL one.

[DaveBlake]

Moving media sources can be tricky, and you may not be able to achieve what you want with shares as the previous post suggests, it will depend on how you have things set up now.

Issues may arise when you come to use library update later. Kodi uses hashes of file/folder name, size and date stamp to determine if that folder or file needs rescanning. Hence I think best to start with an empty lib and let Kodi scan the music files from scratch to build the library.

I understand that you want to avoid rescraping additional art and info for artists and albums, or losing any art choices that you have previously made. This can be achieved using export to single file then import, or export  separate files that creates nfo files and local art. However v18 is better at this than v17, if using alpha is feasible for you.

That leaves the playback history data - user rating, play count and last played date. That is not exported (yet, I hope to get to add that facility), and doing the above you will lose that data. There is an addon that will export this transient data to TADB (@docwra come and describe it), but if you are happy to get your hands dirty with SQL then there are ways of restoring these from one db to another.

Menawhile I hope someone else that has moved their msuic sources may have advice to add.

[jac55]

Thank you for your reply. Just so I am clear on what I need to do to avoid rescraping, here is my existing music library structure and my intended new structure :-

Existing Structure where Music1, Music2, Music3 have been added to my library separately.

Music1          (C://..../.../Music1)  internal PC hard drive
Music2          (D://.../Music2)       internal PC hard drive
Music3          (S://Music3)           external attached portable USB3 drive

I intend to copy these 3 locations as is to my new, bigger drive
Intended New Structure

Music1          (T://Music/Music1)     external attached portable USB3 drive
Music2          (T://Music/Music2)     external attached portable USB3 drive
Music3          (T://Music/Music3)     external attached portable USB3 drive

Can I just add T://Music, or should I add Music1, Music2, Music3 individually?
Do I need to hit the 'Update Library' option after I have copied the music folders across?

[docwra]

I seem to remember people having success with simply editing the SQLite database with a search and replace SQL one liner.

But personally I would re-scrape the whole collection, especially if you don't care so much about ratings or playcounts.

[jac55]

I have decided to rescrape the whole of the Music library. The computer is rather slow so this will take some time.

[DaveBlake]

I have decided to rescrape the whole of the Music library. The computer is rather slow so this will take some time.

 Rescanning is probably easiest route to the kind of file relocation you want to do. However it is the scraping or additional artist and album data and art from online sources that is the slow part, not the tag scanning. Hence you could save time by exporting the album and artist art and info to nfo files, that you then relocate with your music files when you move them.

[HeresJohnny]

To speed up the initial scraping process, remember to turn OFF "Fetch additional information online" on the first run. Also [if using a client/server set up sharing one db between differnt installations of Kodi then move from MySQL] to MariaDB if you can and check out https://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=329046

[jac55]

I did turn off that additional info option on the first run, thanks.

Some quite well known artists are missing, I may run library update again in s few days to see if any more artists get biogs and fanart.

[DaveBlake]

If not fetching info during update, and in v17 and below that can sometimes go wrong as well as slow down lib creation, then you will need to fill any missing art not collected locally by doing "Query for all" from the context menu of both the artist and album nodes (the lists of those things) to pick up the art fro remote sources.