rhythmbox – How to Reset All Rhythmbox Preferences and Library Information

I don't think that Rhythmbox copies music files from MP3-players if the user hasn't told it to do so.

What you saw was Rhythmbox scanning your Music folder. It is default behaviour of Rhythmbox to watch that directory and make sure all music files in that directory are in its music library. It doesn't move or remove or import any music files, it just adds files in your Music folder to the library, so you can play the songs through Rhythmbox.

I had a similar problem with Rhythmbox. I don't have nearly the number of files you have, but it was not seeing new files or changed files. I did the following:

1. In Preferences --> Music, I unchecked "Watch my Library for new files".
2. Completely closed Rhythmbox (important).
3. Renamed the rhythmbox database - ~/.local/share/rhythmbox/rhythmdb.xml
4. Started up Rhythmbox and checked "Watch my Library for new files".
5. It started checking my collection and found everything.

It seems that my problem was an issue with the configuration file. I had reinstalled Rhythmbox, but had not done a complete uninstall. This left a corrupted configuration file in my Rhythmbox sub-directory. You may want to try this if it's possible that you have a corrupted configuration file.