XBMC: Remove Music from Library

I was playing around with my XBMC home theatre setup and decided to add in some music and pictures to the library. The wanted to first do a trial with a small amount and then see how it works before trying to load the full library.

The CD that I loaded failed miserably, when I had ripped the CD I forgot to include the ID3 tag information using the CD database. That was a huge fail, and I don't know to what extent this has affected my mp3s.

So after the first attempt, I tried to look for an option to remove the files from the library. My first thought was to remove the source and then update the library - my thinking here was that once the source is removed I assumed that XBMC would recognise that it is no longer available and remove the records from the library. I thought wrong.

I searched high and low, I even tried to use the clean library function. After reading some forum posts, I realised that this was not going to be as easy with a number of people facing similar challenges. Some suggestions stated to move the files to another location and then to use clean library - since the issue was that the files physically existed on the location.

After some digging I found a method that worked for me, without having to move the files etc... I did the following:

• launched nautilus
• went to ~/.xbmc/userdata/Databases
• deleted the file MyMusic32.db
• Exit XBMC
• Launch XBMC

MyMusic32.db is the database holding the contents of the library for your music. Once you delete this you essentially delete the library, you then need to exit XBMC and then re-launch it. Once you re-launch it XBMC will generate a new database without any content. 

Whilst this solved my issue, this may not solve your issue especially if you have individual music that you want to remove from the library - and I don't have a very good solution to share in this scenario. This is feature, I feel, that has been overlooked by the development team (even as great as they are). To the development team, thank you for all your hardwork on producing something as good as XBMC, I would like to see in future versions some of these functionality to manage the library a whole lot better.