Please help! MM not finding my files!

[danhackley]

Hi and thanks for reading.

Just yesterday I had Mediamonkey up and running. It is running on a Windows 7 latop. My music files are stored on a NAS in a different room, connected via ethernet cable to the laptop. I mounted the network location as a virtual drive, and scanned the contents of the drive using Mediamonkey. It was playing tracks with no problems.

Today, something went wrong when I was trying to set up Monkeytunes. I decided to have a look at the network (IP etc) settings. I connected to my wireless network so that Monkeytunes could communicate with Mediamonkey.

Now I have a problem. I can access the files on the NAS through windows via the mounted drive (Z: - \\192.168.1.100\MP3). However, Mediamonkey does not seem to recognise the mounted drive. It did yesterday. Now my entire library is "grey" and I cannot play any tracks. If I double-click a music file from explorer, Mediamonkey loads up but it does not play the track!

Any help greatly appreciated !

Dan

[nynaevelan]

Did you install any Windows updates recently? Do you use the restore point option, maybe you can restore back to prior to the installation of the patches?? One of your other programs has to have made some type of change because MM has not in the last few days. I run MM on two Win7 machines and an XP machine and I have not had any problems. One of the Win7s updated yesterday with no visible changes to my files and I have the option to update tags immediately turned on. Also did you run any programs that would access your files? Look at them in Windows Explorer, do they have recent timestamp dates?

[danhackley]

I haven't installed any updates recently. I have not created any restore points.

I have 1.5TB of files; the timestamp on them is not recent.

I'm mainly wondering why Mediamonkey is not seeing my mounted network drive, when it has done so fine for the last week.

[nynaevelan]

Do you have the Windows updates set to automatic? I only ask because I have run into many problems with those updates throwing something out of whack. Is everything else seeing your NAS??

[danhackley]

Yes I can browse the NAS from windows. I can view, edit, rename etc the files. However, I cannot double-click the file to play it in mediamonkey! Why would this be?

[nynaevelan]

Can you see/use the tracks from within MM with the Location node? Are the tracks in the Files to Edit - Dead Links node as if they are no longer available? Have you tried rebooting, does this help/hurt?

[danhackley]

Yes, I can see the tracks from within the location node. The location appears as "net:MP3" and all the folders and subfolders are there. The tracks there are greyed out too, and if I double-click on one then it appears in the now playing list, also greyed out!

[Lowlander]

I'm not sure, but I think nynaevelan might have meant the My Computer node.

Anyway this is an issue with mapped drives. Windows seems to randomly give it a different driveID which causes MediaMonkey to not find the files anymore. This is why it's best to use UNC paths in MediaMonkey for your music files.

[danhackley]

How do I use a "UNC path" with Mediamonkey ? THanks

[Lowlander]

That would be \\NASNAME\MP3 or \\192.168.1.100\MP3. I prefer the first one as it allows you to change the IP of the NAS whenever you need to.

[danhackley]

Thanks! I decided to delete the mediamonkey database and re-scan, using the NAS address instead of the mapped drive as the source. Seems to work fine now, though it took a while to re-scan everything, and I will have to re-assign album covers.

[Lowlander]

How did you setup your album covers previously? In most cases you wouldn't need to reassign them.

[danhackley]

The covers are stored in the directory with the music. The front cover is called folder.jpg, though the names of the other covers can vary. MM does not therefore recognise if it is sleeve, media label, back cover, etc. So I had to manually assign and order them in MM. This information does not seem to be remembered in a re-scan.

On another note - as mentioned above, I sucessfully scanned my music directory using the \\192.168.1.100\MP3 address. However I'm having a problem scanning certain individual folders. I have a folder \\192.168.1.100\MP3\Music\H\World, Reggae, Dub\Albums\Artist. When I put this into MM to scan, it doesn't work. When I open the scan dialogue again to look at the folder, MM has changed it to something like \\192.168.1.100\MP3\Music\H\World\, Reggae,\ Dub\Albums\Artist" .

Why does MM change it? Does it not like spaces in the address? This is the only way I can see to scan these folders, as they don't appear in the "location" node (as they're noto scanned in to the library yet) or in the "my computer" node (the 192.168.1.100\MP3 directory does not appear there at all).

Thanks!

[nohitter151]

The covers are stored in the directory with the music. The front cover is called folder.jpg, though the names of the other covers can vary. MM does not therefore recognise if it is sleeve, media label, back cover, etc. So I had to manually assign and order them in MM. This information does not seem to be remembered in a re-scan.

That's why you should save the art directly to the track tags!

[Lowlander]

You could use better naming for the files. For example an image named front.jpg will be automatically assigned as the cover. Otherwise MediaMonkey can't guess what the image is. Embedding art as Nohitter151 advises avoids this issue.

I don't know about the spaces or maybe the , in the path causing the location to be changed. Do you have any paths without either to test?