Moving library location

[Marc Plano-Lesay]

Hi,

I recently moved my location to a different network share, and changed the location in beet's config file. I assumed the paths were stored relatively to said location, but it turns out, it's not the case, and now beets is unable to find most of the files (of course I only noticed this after importing a few albums, so I now have files in both locations according to beets - this is not necessarily a problem as I now at what date the move occurred so I can filter fairly easily).

How can I update beet's database to use the new location? I've seen http://docs.beets.io/en/v1.6.0/faq.html#point-beets-at-a-new-music-directory but the solutions there are a bit tricky:

 - I can't reasonably move the music back and forth, given the size

 - I can't delete the library without losing flexible attributes etc set on items over the years (I assume they're only stored in the library and not in the files themselves)

 - I don't know much about SQL but that might be my best option, despite being discouraged.

Is there a better option I'm not seeing? At this point, I'm considering making a symlink from the new location to the old and move on with my day, but that's fairly terrible. Another potential solution might be to create such a symlink and then move from the old to the new location, but I'm not sure how beets would behave if the files are already seemingly there.

Moving forward, is there a strong reason why the database would store absolute paths when the configuration file already stores the path to the root folder?

Thanks,

Marc