Last night I did some cleanup on my music directory, and I ended up deleting a couple of albums and moving some others. However, Foobar's database simply will not be updated with the changes. If I tell it to remove dead entries and re-scan, that works fine... until the next time I start foobar, when albumlist continues to show the files in their old locations as well as in the new.

I've tried nuking the database, but when foobar is closed and restarted it's back exactly the way it was (no scanning or anything). I've manually deleted database.foo while foobar wasn't running, and it just gets regenerated again as soon as I run foobar.

Foobar2000 also stores metadata in your playlists. Try deleting those and see if the problem goes away

I've had the same problem with songs that I ripped using Windows Media Player (yeah, I don't know what I was thinking either). The solution I found was to show all system files (which are hidden by default in XP and possibly 2000) and delete any desktop.ini files and album art files in my music directory.

This fixed it, thanks. Cleared all my playlists and repopulated them.

No problemo

Just in case you missed it, there is also a Remove dead entries item in the Playlist menu by default, which also cleans any dead items it finds in the playlist from the database as well.

Apparently I was mistaken, as it's still doing this now. If I hit refresh in albumlist the "ghost" entries go away, but they're back every time I restart the program. Has the albumlist got settings someplace separate from the database?

No, it does not. If in doubt, use Find Files or grep on all of your fpl files and search for a particular dead path.

I've solved the problem for me by disabling the option Remeber history across sessions at the foo_history plugin. It seems that this plugin is keeping references to the dead files and repopulates them to the database after a restart. You might also try to delete the history.flg history file, if disabling the option is not working for you.

I'll regard this as a feature request for foo_history then, i.e. removing dead files from the history.

I'm not using foo_history and I don't actually have any .fpl files (since if I'm using albumlist heavily, what do I need written playlists for...)

I switched from single-user to multi-user mode, and the ghost entries aren't showing up anymore, but I am afraid that it'll just do the same thing again next time I want to delete or move something.

foo_history stores file references as FPL file structures, similar to how foo_utils stores files in the clipboard.

I have the opposite problem; I am trying to use the database to keep track of all my music files, so I had FB read all of my MP3&Ogg CDR's, and then I added a different "cdcode" tag for all the files on each CDR. Now I can do a search on the database and know in which disk the files are. The problem is that if I double click on a file by mistake before the cd is loaded, then the entry is deleted from the database. I can't find an option to have the album list keep the records even if the file is eventually not found (because the CDR is not loaded).