Ok, this one is very specific, but if anyone out there has a similar problem, maybe they will stumble upon this post. I am a Rhythmbox user these days, having recently switched back to GNOME from KDE (not to mention I never really liked Amarok, KDE’s default). Furthermore, one of the more recent updates (I believe a GNOME update), changed the mount point of my harddrives from /media/DRIVE/ to /run/media/$USER/DRIVE/. This caused some annoyances for my Rhythmbox library. Let me elaborate.

I have Rhythmbox watch my homefolder’s ~/music for any audio files so they automatically get added without hassle on my end. (Save for bad metadata I guess, but let us keep that for another rant) I also have audio files in a folder on another harddrive however, so when I started to use Rhythmbox, I simply made a symlink to that folder inside ~/music and was done with it.

$ ls -l ~/music
lrwxrwxrwx 1 ward users 32 Feb 15 10:33 warddisk -> /media/warddisk/Muziek/

As I mentioned earlier, suddenly the default mount point changed. Instead of my awesomely named warddisk appearing in /media/warddisk/, it now started getting mounted in /run/media/ward/warddisk/. The problem seemed easy enough to fix, simply change the symlink and Rhythmbox should keep chugging along happily. Right?

$ ls -l ~/music
lrwxrwxrwx 1 ward users 32 Apr 26 17:56 warddisk -> /run/media/ward/warddisk/Muziek/

Wrong! Rhythmbox reported all my files as missing and I was confused, to say the least. After some failures, I did end up finding a way to fix it. You see in the database file that Rhythmbox uses, which is located in ~/.local/share/rhythmbox, there is a mention of a mount point besides the obvious mention of a location.

<location>file:///home/ward/music/warddisk/Band/Album/song.mp3</location>
<mountpoint>file:///media/warddisk</mountpoint>

That mount point was still pointing at the old mount point! So I simply replaced all occurrences of file:///media/ with file:///run/media/ward/ (just use your favourite text editor), saved my changes and started up Rhythmbox. It is a nice sight to finally see all the “missing files” stream back into your library.