Adding your digital music to your Helium library is simple!


Adding digital music files

To index your digital music files in Helium, follow these steps:


  1. Select File > Add music > Add files to Library from the menu
  2. In the dialog that opens, click the Add button to add a folder of your music files. This folders is usually a root folder, e.g. D:\music which contains subfolders with files. Helium will add files in the selected folder and subfolders of all known file types to your library.
  3. If you prefer to add images from tags, checkmark Add pictures from tags.
  4. Click OK to start the adding

Note: You can drag and drop folders from Windows Explorer to the add window to avoid clicking the add button multiple times.


To control which specific formats that should be added during the adding process, click the Formats to add button and checkmark the formats you would like to include from the drop-down list.


To select if the tracks should be added to a specific Volume during add, click the Select... button to the right of the Selected volume label.
Click here to read more about Collections and Volumes.


During the add process, Helium will:
  • Locate files with duplicate checks so that a file is never added more than once
  • Perform album logic to group files into their proper albums
  • Perform artist logic to create all unique artists from the located files
  • Apply found album pictures (from files on disc and from tags if selected)
  • Apply found artist pictures from tags, if selected
  • Calculate artist and album summaries


Note: It is possible to cancel the adding process during some specific steps. Depending on how far the adding process has gone, data MAY have been added so it is strongly recommended to avoid cancellation of the adding process.


Pictures logic
As mentioned above, Helium will search for pictures during an add operation.
Pictures located in the added folders will be prioritized during the matching of pictures after that pictures in tags will matched, if selected.

If no picture was found either in the album folder on disc or in tags, Helium will check for a picture in the albums picture path for album images and in the artist pictures path for matching artist images.
This is an important part of the logic which is useful if you for example need to create a new database and add tracks to, then if you already have a lot of pictures which you have refined, they will be reused in your new database.


Best practices
Although Helium will locate duplicate files during the adding process, it is not recommended to use the Add files tool to perform updates on your library, unless the files comes for a new root folder that doesn't exists in your library.
To perform an update check which will check if files has been externally modified, removed or if new files have been added, use the Update library tool.
The Update library tool will implicitly use the adding tool to add new files, but in a more efficient way than running the Add tool from scratch.


Supported formats

Click here to see the audio file and tag formats that Helium supports.


See also