Moving an album/artist without being recognized as newly added?
#1
If I want to move an album/artist folder within my filesystem to another location, how do I prevent it being recognized as new?

Moving folders of artists/albums results in Kodi recognizing them as newly added. How can one prevent this?

Background:
I do like to have my newly acquired music within a separate folder (New music; also a separate source within kodi) for to be able to listen to these intentionally by choosing to play this source. Once I'm knowing these artists/albums and am able to classify, I'd like to move those artists/albums out of this "New music" folder to where they belong. By doing this, Kodi recognizes them as "new" after updating and cleaning the library.

How am I able to solve moving artists/albums without them being recognized as new and, most importantly, without removing and/or re-adding sources?

If the music is tagged with MBIDs couldn't Kodi recognize a moved album/artist as already present in the DB and just change the path?
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#2
The music library is not designed to make moving media files easy, historically it makes more sense than it perhaps does now with mbid use etc.

The first problem is if you just move the files and rescan then Kodi treats the old media location as if it was a removeable source - it assumes that the media is just temporarily unavailable. It will always see the files in a new location as something new to add to the library.

From memory @Uatschitchun you have Kodi on RPi and run LibreElec, so I am going to assume you are not running v19 yet.  That has changes which I think will help avoid the problem with things showing as "new" because they have been rescanned in a new location, and may even negate the need to have "new things" source that you move things from.
 
  • Recently added album and song nodes are no longer based on most recent ID, but on "date added"
  • What date is used as "date added" is now determined from a 4  option music library  entry  in advanced settings.xml <dateadded>
    0 using the current datetime if none of the above matches or one returns an invalid datetime
    1 using the files mtime (if valid) and only using the ctime if the mtime isn't valid
    2 using the newer datetime of the file's mtime and ctime
    3 using the older datetime of the file's mtime and ctime

I suggest using
Code:
<musiclibrary>
    <dateadded>3</dateadded>
</musiclibrary>
 and then what appears as "new" is completely yours to control by how you set the date timestamp on the media files. Option is applied on scanning.

So try v19, but maybe on just a small subset of your huge collection first as the data update of the whole thing could take a while as it needs a rescan to take advantage of all the new facilities.
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#3
Hey Dave, 

thx for the thorough answer! I've seen that there were some changes in this regard within commits to v19, which brought up the question on my side. 

I'll see to check out v19 and test whether the changes are helpful in avoiding the "move" problem. 

As an example:
I stumbled upon having an artist folder twice in my collection. Had no duplicate albums or files, but simply two folders residing in different locations each with some albums. It's not a problem within Kodi, as it is seen as one artist, but moving those two folders into one resulted in cluttering my "last added" view. This prevented me tidying up my collection by moving folders of albums or artists.

I need to have the "new things" source, as I want to be able to know my music prior to sorting it into my collection. So only if I have listened to an album enough to be able to "identify" and recall it in my memory, I'm able to sort it in without forgetting about it Wink

What happens if I move an already scanned album's folder filesystem wise? It gets re-added as something new, as before, but won't receive a new "dateadded" date if set in advancedsettings? And there will still be 2 entries after movement until the library is cleaned? Or is it recognized that the newly recognized album is already present in the library (by MBID) and only the path gets updated?

Will report back!
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