Existing Database

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 imports metadata only. Your actual audio files need to be in your Station Folder already (either copied there manually or imported via the See This First wizard). The database import just fills in the details for files that are already there.

Setting Things Up

Before you run the import, you need to tell Librarian three things:

Field	What to enter
Database File	The TSV or CSV file from your old system. Click Choose to browse for it. Librarian reads the first row as a header row, so make sure your file has column names in the first row.
Music Folder	The folder on disk where the audio files described by the database actually live. This is where Librarian looks when trying to match database entries to real files.
Subfolder Name	The name of the destination subfolder within your Station Folder. Songs that get successfully matched will be assigned to this category in your library.

Field Mapping

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 import.

The Filepath Column

The most important column to map correctly is the one that contains file paths or filenames. Librarian uses this to find the matching audio file in the Music Folder you specified. It handles both full paths and bare filenames — if your database stores just the filename (like BeatlesHeyJude.mp3), that works fine as long as the file exists in the Music Folder.

Running the Import

When your mappings look right, click Import. Librarian works through the database row by row, trying to match each entry to an audio file. 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:

Left column — Imported: Entries that were matched to a file and added to your library successfully. Each line shows the artist and title (or filename if those fields were empty).
Right column — Not matched: Entries that couldn't be matched to any file in the Music Folder. These are not added to your library.

When Songs Don't Match

If a lot of entries end up in the "Not matched" column, the most common reasons are:

The Music Folder path is wrong or pointing to the wrong location.
The filename column in your database doesn't quite match the actual filenames on disk — a difference in capitalization, a missing extension, or a slightly different format.
The files were renamed at some point and the database hasn't been updated to reflect that.

You can run the import multiple times with different settings — each run adds new matches without duplicating entries that were already imported successfully.

⚠️

Librarian detects and removes duplicate entries automatically, keeping the one with the most complete data. Still, it's worth double-checking a few entries in the Attributes tab after a large import to make sure everything landed where you expected.