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Moving your library to a new PC

A new machine, the same music. Vesari Stylus has no backup or restore button, so this is a manual move: install the app, get your music across, point Vesari at it, put your key back in. Here is the order, and what does not travel.

The short version

1. Install Vesari Stylus on the new PC. See Install Vesari Stylus & first run.
2. Get your music files across, or plug in the drive they already live on.
3. Choose Add Folder and pick the top folder holding your music. See Add your music (the first scan).
4. Open Settings, go to the About tab, paste your key into Activate and press Activate License.
5. Set your API keys and remote streaming up again.

Your music files come first

Vesari reads your music where it sits and never copies your audio files, so moving your library means moving those files yourself: an external drive, your network, or the same drive plugged in. If you would rather Vesari did the copying, Import Music pulls tracks from a drive into a library folder you choose, verifies each copy against the original before it lands, and never writes to the source. Add Folder then builds the library.

What a fresh scan gives back, and what it cannot

A scan rebuilds your track list, albums, artists and artwork from the files themselves, along with every tag saved inside them. For most formats, tags the tag editor or Super-Tag wrote sit in the audio files, so they travel with the music. Some tags live only in the library database, so a fresh scan does not bring them back: a match that Library Health lists under Matched but not written to file, a Discogs apply whose file write failed, an edit to a WAV whose tags the app cannot read (see Tags will not save to a WAV file), and the raw surround files described next.

Raw surround bitstreams are the clearest case: .dts, .dtshd, .ac3, .eac3, .thd and .truehd have nowhere inside the file to hold a tag, so their metadata lives in the library database. Before you move, open Fix Library, find the DTS/AC-3 tag sidecars row and press Write .tags: the metadata goes into a small sidecar beside each track, which copies across with the audio. A WAV that holds a DTS or AC-3 stream is in the same position, but that row does not count it, so open each such track in the Tag Editor tab and press Save Tags first, then check that a .tags file sits beside it.

What no scan rebuilds is what Vesari kept for itself: playlists, play history, stars and ratings. Those live only in the library database on the old PC. The list of duplicate copies you moved aside is in that database too, but if the .aj-quarantine folder at the top of your music folder comes across and you add the music folder itself, the Quarantine tab rebuilds the list when you open it (see Quarantine: how removed copies are kept, restored and purged). That tab opens from a Review duplicates button, which is not always shown: I moved duplicates to quarantine and cannot find the files says when.

Carrying the database across

There is no export command, so the manual route is to copy the app's data folder by hand. Only worth doing if your music will sit at the same paths on the new PC, D:\Music on both say, because the database records every track's full path. Different drive letters, and the copy points at nothing.

If the paths will match:

1. Close Vesari Stylus on both machines.
2. Install and run Vesari once on the new PC, then close it, so the folder exists.
3. Copy the contents of %APPDATA%\com.garyd.audiophile-player from the old PC over the new one.
4. Delete tls_cert.pem and tls_key.pem from the copied folder. The note below explains why.
5. Open Vesari. Your playlists, history and ratings are back.

Where Vesari Stylus keeps your files and settings sets out what is in that folder. If the paths will not match, take the fresh scan instead: a clean library beats one half pointing at a drive letter that is gone.

What the data folder does not carry

• Your licence. It is bound to the machine it was activated on, so the copied file unlocks nothing on the new PC.
• Your API keys. The AcoustID key and Discogs token live in Windows Credential Manager, not the data folder. Paste them in again under Settings, the Authentication tab, in the API Keys group.
• Your free allowance counters. Stamped with the machine they belong to and kept outside the data folder, so nothing you copy carries them across. See What the free allowance covers.
• Your remote streaming credentials. The API bearer token and the OpenSubsonic password also sit in Credential Manager, and the new PC generates its own pair at startup. You never type these in: read them off Settings, the Advanced tab, under Remote Access, then give your phone the new pair and the machine's new address. See Stream your library to your phone.

One thing does travel that should not, hence step 4. The self-signed certificate Vesari makes on first run lives in the data folder with the network address it found at the time baked in, so a wholesale copy leaves the new PC using the old one. Delete the two tls_ files and it builds a fresh certificate on the next launch. Remote access, security and your firewall covers the rest.

Machine slots

Your key is not tied to one computer, but each activation binds to a machine, so a new PC counts as another against it. You have to be online at the moment you activate. If activation answers "License key not found or already used on too many machines.", you have run out of slots. Machines, activation slots and deactivating explains what counts as a machine and how to get one back. Before you wipe the old PC: Deactivate there removes the licence from that install locally, but does not hand the slot back on its own.

The old PC keeps playing

Nothing you do on the new machine reaches back and stops the old one. Even with its licence removed, its library plays in full, forever: playback is never gated in Vesari Stylus, on any tier or licence state. See Free, Pro & Lifetime.

If something is missing that this page does not cover, report it with Report a Bug in Settings.

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