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So, Rhythmbox completely broke my ipod and corrupted the music libraries. While I was trying to fix it, I made the mistake of (accidentally) removing all the music via right-click->remove from my library. Now, I didn't send the music to the trash, which I guess means that it's still on my computer somewhere. Where's it at?

EDIT: Absolutely no chance of recovering music from the ipod itself. The songs are either missing or cut in half due to rhythmbox conveniently crashing on sync.

Anonymouse
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  • Maybe too obvious, but did you look in the 'Music' folder in your home directory? – gertvdijk Jan 20 '13 at 02:13
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    That's the thing that I'm lost on. When I right click on a song in the library I have the options 'Remove' and 'Move to Trash'. Intuitively I think that 'Remove' (which is what I did) would remove them from rhythmbox and not delete the files, but they aren't under 'Music' and I don't have any other library locations in rhythmbox's dconf thingy – Anonymouse Jan 20 '13 at 02:16
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    Try running find -iname *.mp3 (replace .mp3 with the appropriate extension if needed) in a terminal. If the songs are somewhere in your home folder this should find them. – Mark Paskal Jan 20 '13 at 02:30
  • @MarkPaskal You're assuming they're MP3 files. Although, I don't own an Apple device, and I could be wrong. – nanofarad Jan 20 '13 at 02:31
  • @MarkPaskal It looks like there's not a secret folder I don't know about, thanks for the tip. I was experimenting with the 'Remove' function on Rhythmbox; it doesn't delete the file, but when I originally did it I did it to 200 files at once. I think it screwed up there. So they didn't get moved to trash, and they definitely aren't still in the Music folder. I guess they're gone lol...thanks everybody – Anonymouse Jan 20 '13 at 02:36
  • I edited the comment just now. I believe AAC is the correct format to use for apple. – Mark Paskal Jan 20 '13 at 02:36
  • mine happen to be mp3s, so it's all good – Anonymouse Jan 20 '13 at 02:37
  • Ouch. Sorry about your tunes. Are you using an older version of Ubuntu by any chance? I just looked and I don't seem to have an option to just remove songs from the library in 12.10; there's only the option to move to trash. – Mark Paskal Jan 20 '13 at 02:45
  • 12.04...i guess it was fixed then – Anonymouse Jan 20 '13 at 02:47
  • @Anonymouse, no it wasn't. Just lost all my tunes on iPad work when Rhythmbox went down and took my library with it - Ubuntu 12.10. Now no tunes at work and no tunes on the train. Thanks Rhytmbox. – sthysel Feb 25 '13 at 03:00

1 Answers1

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Unfortunately Rhythmbox does not display the source for imported files on the GUI. In case we selected more than a single location "Multiple locations set" will be displayed only:

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We can view and change the directories Rhythmbox should monitor for creating the database by running dconf-editor (from dconf-tools Install dconf-tools) where we can browse to org/ gnome/ rhythmbox/ rhythmdb/ locations):

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If this does not reveal the location of our mp3 files we can also perform a search on our file system which can be done with the default file browser Nautilus.

We open the location from where we want to find our files. In case we want to scan the whole filesystem including mounted additional drives we open the location "File System". In the "Search" line on top we give in an expression to be found in a filename, in this case when we search for mp3-files we may enter "mp3". Note that wildcards are not supported:

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Of course we can also perform searches for files from the command line, e.g with the following commands:

cd /home # use cd / for the whole file system
find -H -name *.mp3

The option -H tells find to not follow symbolic links, the option -name is case sensitive. If you have mp3 and MP3 files choose option -iname instead.

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Takkat
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