Rhythmbox isn't seeing all of my music files

I had a similar problem with Rhythmbox. I don't have nearly the number of files you have, but it was not seeing new files or changed files. I did the following:

  1. In Preferences --> Music, I unchecked "Watch my Library for new files".
  2. Completely closed Rhythmbox (important).
  3. Renamed the rhythmbox database - ~/.local/share/rhythmbox/rhythmdb.xml
  4. Started up Rhythmbox and checked "Watch my Library for new files".
  5. It started checking my collection and found everything.

It seems that my problem was an issue with the configuration file. I had reinstalled Rhythmbox, but had not done a complete uninstall. This left a corrupted configuration file in my Rhythmbox sub-directory. You may want to try this if it's possible that you have a corrupted configuration file.


There are two elements to Rhythmbox noticing files: the inotify watches on all the subdirectories (which may have hit a maximum, check /proc/sys/fs/inotify/max_user_watches, but it should be very high, higher than the number of directories you probably have), and the other is the file type detection that GStreamer is seeing.

Try to see if there are differences from GStreamer's perspective of the file. You can use gst-typefind to do this. A report like this may be useful to help track it down:

find /path/to/files -type f -print0 | xargs -0 gst-typefind

Tags:

Rhythmbox