Lots of ratings lost after rescan

[DC]

Recently I bought a new harddrive and decided to restructure my files and folders. The mp3 files were moved to a different location, too. I didn't want MediaMonkey to do this with auto-organize because not all files were tagged. Also, on a few files/folders I deliberately named the file or folder different from the tagged value and didn't want MM to destroy my manual edits.

So, I cleared the old library and did a rescan on the new location. Only to find that *a lot* of tracks were missing the ratings I had given them before! Maybe other tags are missing, too... As you can imagine I am not thrilled, I spent quite some time with it.

It looks as if MM would not store the rating in the file but only in the library. Is that correct? I don't want that! The library should only be a cache of the tags, for faster querying and access. But how can I make sure that MM stores a rating *into* the file? If I display the file in MM the rating could just as good come out of the library, and I can't tell the difference...

And for what it's worth, the unsynchronized-tags node needs some polishing: it is not helpful to highlight some tags when it does not say what is unsynchronized with what here (ID3V1 vs ID3V2 vs library vs whatnot)... Again it is not clear at all which tag values comes from the library...

[Lowlander]

Almost all tags are stored in database and tags. There is a list in the help file that explains which tags for which file types are stored.

In MP3's the ratings are stored in the tags. You do need to tell MediaMonkey to save tags to tracks when editing then which can be set in the options.

The unsynchronized node shows with diferences in value between library and tags and I believe differences in values between id3v1 & v2. Sometime files will keep showing up because the have corrupted tags. This is common for files downloaded from P2P or when files tags got corrupted by other applications or MediaMonkey. The newest beta fixes issues with MediaMonkey doesn't save tags to the file, but that should be occasional, not for all tracks.

[DC]

Thanks, Lowlander. Well I guess then I lost lots and lots of ratings for no apparent reason because the ratings are not displayed anymore. For example, I have one folder with a few hundred files which I rated occasionally in alphabetical order. Therefore I know that I rated everything from, say A..M. The majority of these files aren't rated anymore.

And if I do it again, how can I be sure that the rating is actually stored in the file?

[Lowlander]

Make sure no files show up in the unsunchronized tracks node.

Try the following to see if you can recover the ratings:
1) Go to the My Music/MediaMonkey folder
2) Check if you see a file called MediaMonkey.mdb.~mdb
3) If so rename MediaMonkey.mdb to MediaMonkeyNew.mdb
4) Rename MediaMonkey.mdb.~mdb to MediaMonkey.mdb
5) Check if your files have ratings again
6) If so go to Files to Edit > Dead Links
7) Select all files
8 ) File > Located Moved/Missing files and select the new location for the music
9) After done you most/all files should have been located in the new location
10) Now you can use Files to Edit > Unsynchronized Tracks to sync the ratings

Take in to account this might undo any changed made since you relocated your files. You now could stay with this DB or go back to the new database. You will need to make sure that the new DB gets updated with the ratings by using add/rescan tracks and allow MediaMonkey to read all tracks tags again (can be set in options).

[DC]

Nice thinking, but did not help. The ratings are lost, I'm afraid. I want to avoid that this happens again, of course. Which brings me back to the question of how to make sure that a rating is actually stored in the file tags, not only in the DB. Right now I am really hesitating to start over with the rating if the data is lost so easily.

BTW, I found an ~mdb file but it was basically an empty DB with no songs at all (filesize 5% of what it should be). I also found an even older ~mdb (6 months old from the time before I moved the mdb location via mediamonkey.ini option). It would not contain most of the ratings but I tried it anyway. The files appear grayed out but if I go to "Dead Links" no files are listed at all. There is a context menu on the "Dead Links" node, "Locate Moved/Missing Tracks..." but if I select this I am told to select files first - and it does not list any. Which is odd, because in the location node all the files are gray.

Anyway, thanks for bothering at all and your constant replies in the last years. Paid support could not be better than this, or maybe you get paid

[Lowlander]

I get paid in gratitude. I'm sorry it didn't work out. I understand what a pain this is.

Did you try to search your PC for any other MediaMonkey databases out there, maybe you still can get lucky allthough I doubt that.

You should check out the backup script available in the Scripts and Components forum to create backups of the database and other essentials so this can be prevented in the future if in any case ratings or other tags didn't get written to the files.