Hints and Tips:Updating JRiver Media Center with SongKong and Jaikoz

A SongKong customer asked me about a problem he was having with SongKong and JRiver Media Center this weekend. Although SongKong appeared to have updated his songs correctly when he looked at the songs in JRiver there was no change, restarting JRiver made no difference.

The problem is that JRiver (just like iTunes) build an index of all the metadata the first time the files are added to JRiver. The advantage of creating an index is speed, you can now browse your file metadata within JRiver very quickly without JRiver having to go back to the files themselves, it only has to go back to the file when you actually want to play the file.

The disadvantage is that if you modify the files with some other tool such as SongKong then JRiver does not know that anything has changed, you have to tell it.

Luckily this is easy enough, just use Edit:Select All to select all your songs within JRiver. Then select Tools:Library Tools:Update Library (from tags). This may take a few minutes depending on how large your JRiver library is. If your library is really large and you have only changed a few files then you can just select the modified files instead of all your files.