The music directory and the database
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## The music directory and the database

The "music directory" is where you store your music files. MPD stores all relevant meta information about all songs in its "database". Whenever you add, modify or remove songs in the music directory, you have to update the database, for example with `mpc`:

    mpc update

Depending on the size of your music collection and the speed of the storage, this can take a while.

To exclude a file from the update, create a file called `.mpdignore` in its parent directory. Each line of that file may contain a list of shell wildcards. Matching files in the current directory and all subdirectories are excluded.

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