Died HD with music - suggestions sought for how to repopulate all missing tracks

2024-12-03 21:28:23

One 750GB HD on the music computer is thrashing and presumably dead

I probably have duplicates of all the music scattered all over the place - among other hard drives-   and I probably have HD catalog file with most of what was on there too - but that is likely out of date.

....whereas Foobar has a fully up to date list of folders and tracks buried somewhere - because it still lists all the tracks

Any good ideas how I can extract this list?  - - so I can start the laborious process of repopulating a new hard drive with the missing tracks?

And any ideas for making the process easier.

I had thought to try to spreadsheet the list of folders and to try to produce a batch file executable and via dos - try to run that on every backup folder I find - hoping that it will sweep up all the folders which still have the identical names and copy those to the new hard drive.

At the end of the day I guess it is dir > filename and compare lists in a spreadsheet to find what has to be found manually

Thanks for any ideas

Re: Died HD with music - suggestions sought for how to repopulate all missing tracks

Reply #1 – 2024-12-04 03:17:28

If foobar still has the database of your library, you can use the Copy Names command to copy any/all fields (including %path%) to the clipboard.

For this default command you can firstly specify what fields to copy in Preferences > Advanced > Display > Legacy title formatting > Copy command. So you could add %path% to see folder structure, along with whatever other tags (maybe separate them by a unique character so they can be split in a spreadsheet)... Then if you have Album List in your layout (or if not just open Library > Album List) and hold [SHIFT] key > right-click "All Music" > Copy Names.

(Could also use Text Tools for the same. Setup in Preferences > Tools > Text Tools, and then right-click "All Music" > Utilities > Text Tools menu)

Re: Died HD with music - suggestions sought for how to repopulate all missing tracks

Reply #2 – 2024-12-04 08:55:19

First thing, make a copy of the fb2k database. (Well the entire fb2k install I'd say, with %appdata% folders.) You don't want it to sync against a "new" folder just because it got the same drive letter and name.

Then: Do you want a list of files to search them up from backup, or do you want the tags from the database? For the latter, foo_external_tags; creating external tags to SQL database will make a snapshot of the tags. Once you have restored files to their location, you can commit them back.

Re: Died HD with music - suggestions sought for how to repopulate all missing tracks

Reply #3 – 2024-12-06 01:59:10

thanks all for the suggestions - will report if anything interesting happens

Re: Died HD with music - suggestions sought for how to repopulate all missing tracks

Reply #4 – 2024-12-06 02:32:59

quick bit of feedback - I went to prefs Media Library and saw the offending J: drive with the error on it (because it is no longer connected) and turned on show errors and copied the text to a spreadsheet as CSV and it accepted all the fields as different lines. I sorted by column and deleted everything which did not start with J: and have a big list. Now it would be nice to figure how to batch extract only one for each folder - rather than list it N times for every track.
Anyone doing the same - don't 'clear errors' from the errors window before you extract the data - because they will be gone forever 
 

Re: Died HD with music - suggestions sought for how to repopulate all missing tracks

Reply #5 – 2024-12-06 23:18:05

The library metadata is stored in a single file, which happens to be a SQLite database.
So go to the directory where you have your fb2k data and look for files named "content.sqlite".
Depending on how old is your installation you may find two or more files of this name, coming from previous versions of fb2k.
But there is the only one which stores your latest current library metadata.

Then, search the Internet for a tool for browsing SQLite database. There are few free ones. Get, install, open the file - you can do anything you like. Also update the database, but you shuld be familiar with relational databases concepts to not to screw the database up and make it not readable by fb2k.

So, FIRST make a copy of the "content.sqlite" file. And work on a copy, not on the master file.

Re: Died HD with music - suggestions sought for how to repopulate all missing tracks

Reply #6 – 2024-12-07 09:33:35

So, what do you want to do really? Extract the filenames because they are going to be the same on your backup? (Make a playlist from the library and save as .m3u ?)