Help  /  Troubleshooting

I pressed Cancel but the track or album was removed anyway

You stopped a job partway through, went back to your library, and something is not where you left it. Here is what stopping does, what it cannot take back, and where a missing file actually went.

The short answer

Pressing Stop never deletes audio. A stopped scan removes no files at all, and it deliberately skips the pass that drops entries for files it could not find, because a half finished walk cannot tell a deleted file from one it had not reached yet.

Only two actions remove audio for good, and both ask you to confirm first: Delete Files from Disk in the right-click menu, and Purge on a quarantine batch. Everything else that takes a file out of your view either moves it into a holding folder inside your own music folder, or removes the library entry and leaves the file alone.

What Stop does during a scan

Stop appears next to the progress on the card that started the job: a tile on the Tools dashboard, or a box in Library Health. It does not cut the job off mid-write. The scan checks for your Stop at two safe points, between folders and between committed batches inside a folder, so it halts with nothing half written.

That leaves you with:

• Everything indexed so far, kept. Those tracks are in your library and play normally.
• No pruning. The list of entries that looked missing is logged and discarded rather than applied. The next full Rescan Library reconciles it with a complete walk.
• No follow-up work. Duplicate re-flagging, artwork caching, thumbnails, online lookups and loudness measurement are all skipped. Loudness measurement is the pass that writes tags into your audio files, so a stopped scan leaves them untouched.
• A short "Stopping...", then a refreshed view of what was indexed before you pressed it.

One narrow exception concerns entries, not files. The scan may have reached a folder you had genuinely deleted and removed its entries, but only on a local drive, with the root above it confirmed online and a bounded check confirming the folder is gone. A timed-out check never prunes, and a network share never does.

What Stop cannot take back

A stop is a halt, not an undo. Work already finished stays finished.

• Tracks indexed before the stop stay in the library.
• Stop a loudness scan and the tracks already measured keep their values. The partial one in flight is discarded without changing the file; the rest stay unmeasured.
• Cancel a duplicate cleanup and the copies already moved stay in quarantine. They are restorable, but the cancel does not put them back for you.
• At the start of each folder, a scan moves aside decoded WAV leftovers a ripping tool left beside their source stream, for example a track.dts.wav next to a track.dts. It only does this when that source file is in the same folder, and it moves rather than deletes. A stop does not move them back.

The Cancel on a duplicate cleanup

A different button, a different job. While a cleanup batch runs, a strip shows Moving duplicates to quarantine... with a count and a Cancel. Each copy is moved, never deleted. Cancel stops the batch after the file in flight, and the copies already moved stay in quarantine, restorable a whole batch at a time. Quarantine: how removed copies are kept, restored and purged covers the round trip.

Where a removed file actually went

1. Quarantine. Inside the music folder you added, look for .aj-quarantine, then a batch folder, then the original folder path: a file from D:\Music\Rock\Loveless sits under Rock\Loveless in that batch. I moved duplicates to quarantine and cannot find the files walks it through.
2. The wav-leftovers folder in that same .aj-quarantine area, for the decoded WAV case above.
3. Still on disk, under a different entry. A completed scan reconciles the library with what is on disk. Move music with another tool but keep it inside your library folders, and the entry follows the file to its new path, taking your stars, playlists and history with it. Move it outside those folders and the entry goes, while the audio stays put.
4. Renamed in place. If you saved in the tag editor with Rename file on save ticked, the file is in the same folder under a new name from your pattern.

If the folder is a NAS share or an unplugged drive, nothing was removed at all. Offline folders keep their entries and are marked offline, and Reconnect & re-probe in Library Health brings them back once the drive is reachable. How scanning works explains the difference between offline and gone.

The delete confirmation

Delete Files from Disk confirms first, naming how many files it will remove, and waits for your answer. Cancel takes focus as it opens, so a stray Enter cannot delete anything, and Escape or a click outside counts as Cancel. Nothing proceeds without pressing the named delete button, and the delete is confined to the music folders you added.

Still missing

If a track is gone, is not in .aj-quarantine, and you did not delete it yourself, tell us. Open Settings and use Report a Bug: say what happened, which job you stopped, and roughly when. It attaches your recent logs, which include file paths from your library. See Is this a bug? How to report it.

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