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[Tim Harvey]

My wife and I each have our own computer's in the house, and I have a headless 'audio server' running MC as well.  I have been trying to determine the best configuration for us.

I went down the path of setting the headless 'audio server' as the 'Library Server' and having us connect to it as Remote Server MC clients.  This is a really nice feature accept for the following:
  * clients cannot modify the database:  This was not even obvious to me at first.  The clients can change view schemes, add playlists etc, only to find that the next time they load MC it downloads the library fresh and all your changes are gone (would be nice if MC wouldn't allow you to make these local changes).  This also precludes one from being able to say, rip a CD into the library from a client.  I can see where that would be an advantage, but its too bad there isn't a way to allow/disallow it.  For example, if we rip a CD from our clients, even if we configure our client to rip the data to the network share that all our music is on, the MC Library Server does not see the new content without forcing it to do an import.
  * for the above reasons a client cannot have its own playlists
  * The library server always streams the music even if the files are accessible to the cilent directly via the network.  This causes an unwanted duplication of network overhead as well as an extra burden on the library server.  I want the library server to 'just' be a master database, not a file server

Because of these issues, I'm thinking of setting up MC so that we each have our own Library.  However, I would still like to be able to share (sync) playlists and rip CD's to the master library.

I do use a NAS server for the actual music repository that all the systems running MC would access.  I have configured MC on both our  client systems so that rip's get stored on the NAS server, so the process of ripping a CD for us goes like this:
  * rip the CD on any system runing MC
  * do a Tools->Import from every other machine to get the new items in their respective libraries

for playlists I'm looking at the following method:
  * create/edit your playlist with MC (if your going to edit an already created playlist, first re-import it from the NAS server in case someone has changed it)
  * export it to an M3U on the NAS server
  * on other machines re-import the playlist to get the updates

While the above methods work, they involve extra steps and are very confusing for the wife.

I've looked into the 'Media Scheduler' thinking that perhaps I could schedule periodic 'Library Imports' and such, but it doesn't look like ther Media Schedule supports a lot of different operations into MC.  Perhaps there is something i'm not easily seeing, like perhaps some command line options that can cause MC to do things like imports?  I think I'll look at the registry and see if I can figure out how the explorer shell integration works to see if I can schedule imports on the network share in that fasion.

Does anyone have any suggestions for making this process simpler?

[Bill Kearney]

Yes, it would be very helpful if the documentation made this clear.  That is, MC11 clients do not share read/write access and update to the libraries. 

I seem to recall there being a thread here somewhere that discussed the creation of playlists remotely.  That is, make the playlist on some other machine and write the file to a place that MC11 could read it from.

[Alex B]

Tim, I didn't fully read your post, but here is what I have done:

http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=28617.0

It is a sort of workaround, but it works for me.

[Tim Harvey]

Tim, I didn't fully read your post, but here is what I have done:

http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=28617.0

It is a sort of workaround, but it works for me.

Ya, I came across this thread while researching this and felt that it was clearly not as simple as what I was currently doing.  I also share the media (using a NAS) however I don't really see the point in backing up the library and restoring it.  I have found that just running Tools->Import is less work and its very efficient (skips anything already in the library)

I've also come across KingSparta's plugin for scheduleing imports (and have found you can do this also with Task Scheduler or MC's own Media Scheduler by running the mc11 exe with the  '/SilentImport [path_to_files]' cmdline options)

What would make this extremely painless is that if an MC Remote Server client could somehow manually or automatically trigger an import.  Perhaps anyone could recommend an easy way to do this from one PC to another (maybe girder).  Is there any way to hook something into the completion of a rip job and/or playlist change on an MC Remote Client? 

If I could have some sort of a rule on the MC Remote Server client that said:
  * whenever a CD RIP completes successfully, kick off 'mc11.exe /silentimport //music/music' on the Library Server
  * whenever a playlist change has completed in the 'Shared Playlists' playlist group, kick off 'mc11.exe /silentimport //music/playlists' on the Library Server (although importing of a playlist from my experience won't work that way but I consider that a bug or severely lacking feature)