Desktop only. The Import tab and all of its sub-pages are part of Librarian Desktop and are not available in Librarian Mobile. To bring new audio files into your library, use Librarian on your station Mac.
If you're migrating from another music scheduling system — or if someone hands you a spreadsheet of track information — the Existing Database sub-tab can bring that data into Librarian. It reads TSV or CSV files and lets you match up the columns from the old database with Librarian's fields.
This tool only works with songs already in your library. It never copies, moves, or creates audio files — it matches each database row against a song you've already imported and writes the mapped fields into that song's existing record. If your files aren't in Librarian yet, bring them in first with the Do This First wizard.
Before you run the match, you need to tell Librarian two things:
| Step | What to do |
|---|---|
| Folder | In the Station Folders list on the far left of Librarian's main window, click the folder you want this database associated with. Whatever's selected there is what the Existing Database tab shows and works against — there's no separate folder picker inside the tab itself. Selecting a folder also includes every song in its subfolders, so picking a parent category (like Music) covers everything nested underneath it too. |
| Database File | The TSV or CSV file from your old system. Click Browse to select it. Librarian reads the first row as a header row, so make sure your file has column names in the first row. |
The folder shown in the Existing Database tab always mirrors your current sidebar selection — switch folders in the sidebar at any point before running the match, and the tab updates to match.
Once you've selected a database file, Librarian reads its column headers and displays a mapping table. Each row in the table represents one column from your source database, with a dropdown on the right where you choose the corresponding Librarian field.
Librarian makes a best guess at the mappings automatically — if your source database has a column called "Artist" or "Title", it'll map those correctly without you having to do anything. Columns it can't confidently identify are left unmapped and shown in gray; you can assign them manually or leave them if you don't need that data.
You don't have to map every column. If your old system had fields that Librarian doesn't use — or fields you simply don't care about — just leave them unmapped and they'll be ignored during the match.
The most important column to map correctly is the one that contains file paths or filenames. Librarian uses this to find the matching song already in your library, within the folder you selected in the sidebar. It handles both full paths and bare filenames — if your database stores just the filename (like BeatlesHeyJude.mp3), that works fine as long as a song by that filename already exists in the selected folder.
If a row's Filepath doesn't turn up a match, Librarian falls back to guessing from the Artist and Title columns — trying a few common filename patterns, then a looser search for filenames that simply contain both the artist and title text.
When your mappings look right, click Run!. Librarian works through the database row by row, trying to match each entry to a song already in the selected folder. The process runs in the background — the status bar shows progress as it goes.
When it's done, the results appear in a two-column view:
If a lot of entries end up in the "Not Matched" column, the most common reasons are:
Because this tool only writes fields into existing records, it's safe to run more than once — re-running the match with the same or an updated database simply overwrites the same songs' fields again, rather than creating duplicates.