What is Songbird 1.2 creating directories in my Music Folder?

Yes of course I have a backup. I was a Drive Storage Engineer, so you know, not clueless. 2 separate backups actually. I wanted to make a point above. But I also know 80% of users don't have backups. What happens when thanks to SBs stupid design anbd lack of backup someone does lose all their music?

Sondbird has a new feature called 'Manage Music' that will rearrange your music collection. When I upgraded it was off by default so I'm surprised it bit you like that.

Yes, IAmAl is right.

This option is turned off by default (it was for me, too). I'm surprised that it doesn't seem to be turned off for you.
The setting can be found in menu Tools -> Options -> Manage Music. Ususally everything is deactivated, until you explicit press "Turn Managed Mode On".
Are you sure you didn't do that?

I accidentally activated Music Management once, too, because I thought I could change the path to my Watched Music Folder there... :-/

This option should be made more clear, imho, I misunderstood it. Okay, I'm not native english speaker, maybe that's a problem, too. But I think a second Dialog like "You clicked 'Turn Managed Mode On', that means that you music files & folder are going to be rearranged and ... Are you sure you want to do this? YES / NO" can only help and doesn't hurt.

Also I think the tab "Media Importer" (where the real watch-folder setting is) could be moved up, right before "Manage Music" (or Manage Music) after "Media Importer".

Okay, i think this post is now as confusing as the manage music-settings. I hope you understand it anyway :-D

Atrieu wrote;
"I accidentally activated Library Management once, too, because I thought I could change the path to my Watched Music Folder there... :-/ "

That's what happened after new install. Before I did anything I went into Preferences. Clicked that on while faffing around with other things. Didn't realize (because there was no notification) that it was going to mess with my /home folder and MOVE tracks. Defective By Design.

With Rhythmbox essentially dead, I find myself forced to SB. (Because I dislike most of the other players even more). But everytime I use it I find problems.
This time I noticed about 1300 tracks aren't showing in my library. No idea why, I have no WMA or DRM files.

I would PAY, yes PAY, for something as good as Media Monkey, on Linux. SB is certainly not it, nor likely to be for a looooooooooooong time.

Well, I'm glad we now know where the problem is: Not Songbird does something wrong, but the Options-UI is irritating and make the user do things they don't like to do!

POTI-Team: Please improve it and make the options more clear, before other ran into this trap and are getting frustrated, too!

I love this feature. An easy way to re-organise my MP3 files. It is not SB who messed up the collection it was the user. First the user turned the option on then he did not look well enough at the preview and then he deleted the files without checking that the still existed in the old place.
I only miss the option to store the tracks with a fixed length. I mean 01 - Title instead of 1 - Title. A matter of sorting the tracks in the right order.

Yes, it was me who deleted the files. No question. But it was me BECAUSE of the new design. Never in any other media manager since the first Winamp in the mid-90s has any media manager actually changed my preferred structure on my hard drive.

Actually let me clarify further a SB design reason for this.
In Options the first/top list item is Main, which allows you to select Home Page, Music & File downloads destinations.
The Second item list is Manage Music. In there is (apparently) where to set your Music Collection location but is greyed out by default. To make it selectable you must set Manage Mode to ON. Then you can set a location. Of course what you may not realise (as with me and Atreiu) is that you are actually giving SB permission to fuck up your collection.
BTW, Atrieu, your english is fine and NOT the cause of the problem.
Further down the list at Item 11 !! on the 2nd Tab is the Watch Folder location.
Oh yeah, that makes sense.
BTW, the actual Watch option? Not working for me today after replacing the deleted tracks. No idea why not. And typical SB, no way to force "Scan".

I am inclined to think that the design of the Music Management feature is a little confusing. My previous player, Quintessential, had a similar feature that allowed you relocate files, however it was 'on-demand' function which ran once upon request, rather than as a passive, background function as with Songbird. Although the version of Quintessential I used didn't have a music library so I guess it didn't make sense for it to work like Songbird.

One criticism I would make is that, it wasn't exactly clear that at which point it would it would start relocating files. As soon as I click the Turn Managed Mode On?, as soon as I click Ok or at some other point?

I have a suggestion: perhaps rather than something that you turn on and off, have a button labelled Run once now and an additional check box labelled Run every time library is modified.

I personally think the feature is great (more than great, thanks you all), but each person has a different way to manage it, and people suggested MANY times to do it manually (some kind of regular expression to tell it how do want it...).

For me, i have folders with year - cd, but now i can ́t do this. Only 3 things, so it is: genre - artist - cd

That ́s horrible U_U

Nearly (but for some reason not always) every time I start Songbird on my 64-bit Vista system, it attempts to reorganize all or most of my library, including tracks it has organized before. The only clue I have as to why is that, if I cancel the operation and then open the management options and click on Preview, I see that all of the "from" paths are written in all lower case and the "to" paths are properly capitalized, when in fact all or very nearly all directories and files in my library are already properly capitalized to begin with (because Songbird has already renamed everything before). Now, this problem doesn't seem to affect the functionality of Songbird, it really just makes it take longer to start, but it's still annoying. I'll be happy to provide any other information that might be helpful.


Edit: I should clarify something here. I created the library in question from a library folder that already existed and was already properly organized (that is, by artist and then by album). I simply told Songbird to use this path as its managed library and then added the entire folder using the import media command in the file menu.

This reply was created from a merged topic originally titled
Inordinate number of management actions given an already mostly organized directory.

Why would you have an alphabetic folder system?? That's just.. Weird? Well up to you of course, and I totally understand the problem. I was actually quite close to do the same thing, and I'm on of those stupid persons who doesn't backup hes music, even though he loves it.. :P

I totally agree that there should be a warning..

So is the thing I reported some kind of scan, to make sure nothing needs to get copied or renamed? Okay, I misunderstood; the thing I thought was a bug was by design. But there is still a problem; this scanning process (assuming that's what this is) should either have to be started manually by the user or somehow be done in the background so as to avoid essentially increasing the startup time of the program tenfold. I mean, it seems like kind of a hack to me; it shouldn't be necessary to check the library unless something is wrong with it.