Howdy everyone. I've been scouring the forums trying to figure something out, and hoping someone can weigh in on what i found.
All i want to do is to be able to listen to the files on my home computer at work and have a single set of playstats.
Now given that simple-sounding goal, what follows is mildly insane considering i can just copy the files to an external drive, hook it up to my work machine and go. The chances of listening to the same thing twice in one year is probably remote, but i know there are enough people in this forum who also obsess over this stuff
, so bear with me if you're game, and apologies for the length of this post!
That said, i also know that the straightforward option for this is to run Library Server on the home PC and connect to it at work. I've been testing this (after upgrading to MC12, which i'll probably stick with) and it seems to work just fine and i'll probably do that some, i just don't like the idea of keeping that computer on 40 hrs a week just to serve that.
So searching for alternatives have revealed several potential options.
1) Set up an external USB hard drive as a "device" in MC, sync all files to it (or as much as it can hold) and it will update the playstats when i reconnect it occasionally. This idea was largely from this post:
<http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=31857.msg236776#msg236776>
But i think what's missing here is a note that is in the Help under handhelds: "Statistics (iPod only)"
If this worked, i could do it with a small thumbdrive, and testing that the last couple days did not work very well. Again, since it's not an iPod, i'm assuming there's no way for the "device" to log playstats.
2) Copying all the files to an external USB drive, and then using some sort of import of the playstat metadata to reconcile the changes made on the remote/work library to my base/home library. Several posts have revealed that this is just not possible, and has been requested of the feature list, but hasn't appeared. Is there any plan for this in development?
The closest ideas revolved around exporting the metadata to an MPL or XML file. The limitation seems to be that an MPL import can't update a file that already exists in the library.
SO, that led me to this idea:
3) Coming up with some way of synching the actual library files and making the two MC installations *think* they're always looking at the a single one.
Mixing these two threads:
<http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=34186.msg233240#msg233240>
<http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=32484.msg222824#msg222824>
here's what i think i can do.
On my home base hard drive, move all music to one dir (which it pretty much is, but would take some rearranging via "Rename Files from properties".
ie, C:/music/
C:/music/vinyl
C;/music/notbackedup
C:/music/etc (cuz i like to do a little more sorting on this stuff)
Then subst x: for c: on the home PC.
Then, xcopy all files to the external usb drive to preserve subdirectory structure under /music. Take the drive to work, and subst x: for g: (or whatever it is).
Then, adapting the scripts and batch files in the second thread above, create a script that will copy the library to a central location (i'm thinking ftp it to a separate account) when MC closes, but also copy the lib *from* that location when it starts--AND apply it to both home and work PC.
Whew! However, if i'm understanding it all, I think this would actually work. However, but i have two clarifications:
a) Will adding new files in either location be a problem? Let's say after i implement this, i download a new album from Emusic at work. When i get home, my home MC will know about the new album from the library update, but just won't actually have the files, correct? And vice-versa: i might burn a new CD at home, but not take the files with me to work. But this shouldn't be a problem: i can just move these files to the opposite location whenever i want, and they'll be fine, right? And there are drive-synching tools i could use for that, no?
b) What if my USB drive is smaller than my home PC's drive, and so eventually runs out of space? I'm thinking this has two solutions:
i) when i run out of space, just remove the files from the USB and it's the same as the above: the library will know about them, but just will only be able to play them from the home PC. I just better not do a library update at the work location with the files missing !
ii) create an additional dir under C:/music like: c:/music/overflow and then get an additional drive (i was thinking of using a few older drives with enclosures) and subst another drive letter on each machine for //music/overflow.
I welcome any comments from anyone on this conundrum!
-steve
Author
Topic: Library synchronization on two PC's (Read 1374 times)