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Duplicate file idea...

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Matt:
Hi everyone,

We're still thinking about duplicate files a little bit for MC23.

I think the most common way duplicates can happen is if you have a mapped network drive (let's say S:\) that points to a network path (let's say \\Linux\pc\).  When you're setup this way, you can just happily import from both S:\ and \\Linux\pc and MC will just see two files.

So one approach to fix that would be to ask Windows to expand the path at import time.  This way if you imported from S:\, it would just get automatically expanded to \\Linux\pc.  This would totally solve the duplicate problem.

However, it has an icky effect that if you had a library built around the S:\ drive, it's going to import a new second copy of everything.  We haven't really figured out a way around this.

Are we on the right track with any of this?  Any ideas or suggestions to make it even better?

Thanks.

DJLegba:
Duplicate album detection should be easy enough just by looking at the number of tracks and their lengths.

AndrewFG:
Or do a cryptographic hash on the contents..

marko:
Will this have any effect on client MCs?

I'm thinking...

Our HTPC connects, gets the library from the server.
I cannot remember exactly what it's called, but the option to 'play local file if it exists' is checked.
The entire library is reachable locally by way of network shares. If the HTPC expands those paths, it will surely break the "play local file" option?

-marko

Hendrik:

--- Quote from: Matt on May 30, 2017, 12:54:33 pm ---So one approach to fix that would be to ask Windows to expand the path at import time.  This way if you imported from S:\, it would just get automatically expanded to \\Linux\pc.  This would totally solve the duplicate problem.

--- End quote ---

I would prefer my files to be imported on the same path I told MC to look for them, and not to do anything weird to them. IMHO software should behave on the principle of "least surprise", and it changing the path under me would be rather surprising. :)

A drive may not be the same everywhere - for example, in my setup: My "S:\" drive (really Z:\ for me) is a locally mapped drive on the server (using the handy "subst" command), while on the clients its a mapped network drive - that way the server can avoid to go through the network stack to read files, and only the clients will do that.

Another thing, at one point in time, I rebuild my server that MC was running on, so for migration purposes both old and new were running at the same time - I could just change the mapped drive to point to the new server, and everything worked out of the box. With this, I would have to fix every single library entry.

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