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[HTPC4ME]

well ive managed to fill up my music drive with about 10 gigs left on it. and still in the process of tagging all the files(which ive been working on for a couple months now and hoping that that will be enough room to move the files around and change the drive folder structure once they are all tagged properly. to the ABC-Z instead of genres\artist\album structure i have now?!)

Being ive just bought a new music drive. what is your suggestions on sorting laying out the next drive\all drives to come?  do you guys have your hard drives With folders  ABC-Z with artist\album in those? do you suggest the drive i'm tagging now i set it up ABC-Z?  Reason i ask is for server reasons.. when one has many files of the same media type what have you guys found to be the easiest for Sorting? Searching etc?  example your looking for zztop. it could be on music drive 1 Folder Z or music drive 2 Folder Z ...

Also Thumbnails... What do you guys do with multiple drives of music, pictures, videos, do you have a Designated drive for thumbnails? Cause eventually these media drives will become full and if you have one of those drives as your designated thumbnail drive and as you add more drives There will eventually be no more room for building those thumbnails if the location is on one of those drives. Correct?

TY for any tips.

[fitbrit]

I use unRAID. I built a server that I added storage to incrementally as I could afford it. By creating drive shares, which you can map to drive letters, you can organise your media any way you want with respect to the physical media.

For example, I have a Movies share, which is mapped to drive M:\
When I only had 3 drives, my unRAID server had a folder called Movies on all three drives. Any contents of those folders on the drive all showed up pooled under 'drive' M:\ to MC12 or MC13. As I ran out of space, and added more drives, I assigned the Movies drive share to disks 4 onwards too.
I also had a TV Shows Share T:\, which was present on the same physical drives as Movies, but showed up as a separate mapped drive to Windows and MC.

With such a server, you can set up one huge share called Music, with subfolders A-Z inside. The data may be on different drives, but it'll be transparent to you and MC.

I hope this makes sense.

A thread on unRAID I started a long time ago:

http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=46435.0

[HTPC4ME]

Great info TY.. not sure if i should be asking here or in the forum post you provided. but being my server isnt up and running yet. and im just using a Antec 1200 case. For the time being With this new music drive should i just name the folders ABC-Z then? and then once server is up and use the unraid option will it automatically join the ABC-Z on all music drives for me? or will i run into filename issues you think? TY

Also

With such a server, you can set up one huge share called Music, with subfolders A-Z inside. The data may be on different drives, but it'll be transparent to you and MC

would this be transparent when i'm on the road as well? via my server program? Easy file share\bulletproof etc...
TY

[leezer3]

You're still thinking in terms of drives and files, don't
My stuff is spread across approx 5tb (9 media drives in 3 machines, some of these are larger RAID conglomerations), and I simply don't consider drives or filenames.
The MC database is used for finding anything, I don't worry about its physical location. The only fixed drives I have are these:
C:\ - Windows drive. Local docs are also kept here.
D:\ - Apps drive. All apps installed here, no media etc.
H:\ - Incoming. All downloads are dumped on here, nothing gets imported.
I then cleanup the downloads, move them onto the newest drive & import into MC.

All that matters is in the database, everything else is unimportant.

-Leezer-

[fitbrit]

Great info TY.. not sure if i should be asking here or in the forum post you provided. but being my server isnt up and running yet. and im just using a Antec 1200 case. For the time being With this new music drive should i just name the folders ABC-Z then? and then once server is up and use the unraid option will it automatically join the ABC-Z on all music drives for me? or will i run into filename issues you think? TY

Also
 would this be transparent when i'm on the road as well? via my server program? Easy file share\bulletproof etc...
TY

It doesn't really matter how you organise your media for now. MC does a wonderful job of organising things in an instant when you're ready. If you'd like to name folders now, you may, and tranfer them to the server once you build it. You can optionally also move files between disks with unRAID, as well as between shares. I sometimes move items from \\mediaserver\disk10\movies to \\mediaserver\disk6\movies, for example. MC doesn't notice any change when you do that - it's the same as moving an item from M:\ to M:\. Sometimes I move media from \\mediaserver\disk6\import to \\mediaserver\disk6\movies. In Windows/MC that's moving an item from my I:\ drive to my M:\ drive, but since it's all on the same physical disk, it's a very fast transfer.

Bottom line - organise your media however you want to now. Using an unRaid server will mean that you can continue to expand and add to your folder structure without having to worry about your "D" music folder running out of space on the drive it's on. You can even specify in unraid that subfolders a certain level down do not have their contents split up among disks. That way, the tracks on whole albums can not only have the same path in Windows and MC, but also be on the same physical disk too.

[HTPC4ME]

ok im a little confussed on how do the next step..

alright for now i just duplicated all files on the drive by doing this.. http://www.pcreview.co.uk/forums/thread-3438321-2.php

so basically the folder structure is the same on both drives and ive started adding files to the second drive where they belong. now in media center i auto imported from that new drive... and here is where i am confussed. when i click on say video media mode to show all video files it shows 2 seperate drives. how would i edit the view to have both of those drives files show up as one?
meaning in jriver D drive acdc and E drive acdc. it would just show up as file location acdc once not twice? so it would combine them for me? or is this not possibe? am i going to have to check location D acdc and then check location E for the certain file?  Or another scenario...if i just want to listen to all of acdc albums and they come out with a new album and i need to put it on to drive two after buying it. if i click location D that new album wouldnt show up cause its in location E. am i using the wrong views for multiple drives?

sorry if this is confussing just trying to figure out a way to get both drives to mesh together in jriver so that i have one location of the same folder structure and i dont have to go to 2 locations.

TY for any help

[fitbrit]

Yes, maybe I'm a little confused. The setup I was talking about was with a special type of server OS called unRAID. You build a server, boot up with the OS and assign your disk shares. WIthin that OS you define which drives will be part of which shares and Windows will see it as such. It sounds to me like you've simply created the same directory structure in Windows (?) on several drives and are hoping to see them as one drive in MC. Am I right? If so, that won't work, unless you have a way of assigning disk shares using a NAS setup, or an OS server like unRAID.

[HTPC4ME]

shoot ok. yeah i only have a antec 12 hundred now... so basically all drives are in that. ive yet to go the server route... still researching my options for that. i guess i was hoping there was a way to do it within jriver so that all drives would show as one for the files to make finding searching playing etc easier.. ty for your reply again and your expertise.

[fitbrit]

You can do what you're looking for by making a smart playlist; e.g. if you want ACDC tracks, regardless of which drive they're on, and you have them in folders like: D:\ACDC\ and E:\ACDC\, then a smartlist with the simple rule [Filename (Path)] contains \ACDC\ should do the trick. You'll see all the tracks in any folders, on any drives, with \ACDC\ in the filepath in one list.

[HTPC4ME]

anyway do that easy with say ummm over 1,000 artists?  i have one drive full of music all organized by gerne\ artist\album (tracks of album)... so do make that many smartlist would take me forever i think. the location root has worked great for one drive, just be nice to see all music somewhere in the proggy so i can hit shuffle lets say and it will play from both locations. or again play all music of an artist no matter what drive its on.

ty again for your reply. much appreciated

[fitbrit]

Yes there should be an easy way to do this with the viewschemes and panes. Somebody else should be able to help you easily with this, but I can try. Go to Audio root view scheme. Some panes should appear, most likely genre, artist and album. Choose any artist. Click on the name, and voila, all tracks /albums by that artist will appear.
You have tagged the tracks first haven't you, so that the details are in the files, or at least the MC library?
As I said, I'm not that proficient at this compared to some, so hopefully someone can help you better. You may need to start a new topic, because your question has evolved into something more related to viewschemes and less about servers.

[HTPC4ME]

yes that part works. but sadly not all taggin is done hence why i use the location root. becauseeverything is sorted right away which i started years ago. and the tagging process ive been playing catchup on and slowly winning.  i think i will take your advice and start a new thread on this. that way once i get my pennys together if i run into server issues we can continue that part here. thanks for the tips and help. And i will post  a new thread tomm. and this should help others as well that are running into full drives and maybe curious how to set up schemes for multiple identical media types without having servers yet.

thanks again

[fitbrit]

yes that part works. but sadly not all taggin is done hence why i use the location root. becauseeverything is sorted right away which i started years ago. and the tagging process ive been playing catchup on and slowly winning.  i think i will take your advice and start a new thread on this. that way once i get my pennys together if i run into server issues we can continue that part here. thanks for the tips and help. And i will post  a new thread tomm. and this should help others as well that are running into full drives and maybe curious how to set up schemes for multiple identical media types without having servers yet.

thanks again

I believe by using a combination of Move/Copy Fields and Find and Replace you can quickly tag a lot of things. Using the E:\ACDC\ example again...
You could copy the Filename Path to "Artists", then use Find and Replace to remove any extraneous characters like 'E:' and album subfolders if you have them. But do look at the Library tools and 'Fill Properties from Filename'. That may save you a TON of time!

[Alex B]

xtacbyme,

I read quickly through this thread, but I am still unsure of what exactly you have now (or before if you already changed the file locations) and what you are trying to accomplish.

What is the total size of your media files (in gigabytes) and how big is the new drive? If you bought a significantly bigger drive, would the most straightforward method be to copy all folders and files to the new drive as they are on the old drive using Windows Explorer and just fix the drive letter with the Rename, Move, & Copy Files tool inside MC? (It can optionally apply the changes only to the database.)

After testing that everything works as intended you could delete the files from the old location and get lots of free space for other things.

I just consolidated the media files from three almost full 300 GB drives to one new 1 TB drive. The drive has now only a bit over 100 GB of free space, but probably, when the time to upgrade comes, I can buy a 2 GB drive for the same price I paid now.

In addition to installing a new internal 1 TB drive I copied the contents of the new drive to a new external 1 TB USB2 drive that can be used with any PC. For now, the three old 300 GB drives are in a shoebox and serve as an additional backup set. Later on I'll revice my backup strategy, because I always want to have two, quite up-to-date backup sets of my media files.

[mesue]

Get Windows Home Server. Run out of space... add new drive. You're done. All drives are added to the storage pool and the file paths never change. No messing with mapping or drive letters and all computers access media with the same paths. So easy. I love my little HP MediaSmart.

A few weeks ago one my drives started having bad clusters. I told WHS to remove it. The data is migrated to other drives, and once it's done you just pull the drive. Replacement came, I popped in the new one, and that was that. Most painful part was waiting on UPS. ;-)

[HTPC4ME]

alex B i have all tera drives. so one tera drive is all music, one is all business videos, one is all pictures\ebooks. now when those are full you need to buy another drive for each to continue.so music drive is full. but when artists that where on first drive come out with new music and ya buy there msuic they would then be on second drive due to first drive being full. in media center they show up under audio media mode as 2 sepearate drives location root.  so i was wondering how i would redo the custimze view so that both drives would show up as one not drive location root D and also drive location root E

Mesue how many drives do you have in that?  i have over 10 drives now and only have one machine and that machine is running vista ultimate. and if i remeber right i cannot install windows home server on my custom built machine id have to buy a windows home server box\software. and if i do that i think i'd go with a nas type solution then. thanks for the option

[fitbrit]

Forgive me for saying so, but I think you need to transition from thinking of things in terms of drives and folders to simply seeing the right stuff in your library, without worrying about which drive or folder it's in. It seems to me that you're using MC as two things:

A) A non-free version of Windows Explorer
B) A non-free music player

You can really get a lot more out of the program and make your life much easier. I'd recommend a server box like unRAID, or even Windows Home Server over a NAS device anyday, because of easier expansion and a much cheaper overall cost. unRAID handles up to 16 drives, has built-in redundancy for drive failure and is easily expandable too. MC is the perfect tool to go with it, so you can concentrate on your music and let MC handle how it's organised. However anal you are about your music organisation on your drives, MC can accommodate you... provided you have the space/server back-end.

[mesue]

Currently, I have 3 drives in my HP MediaSmart (2.5 TB total). It supports 4 internal drives and I don't know if there is a limit with externals. It has USB and eSATA (port multiplier) for external drives. But I'm pretty sure you can buy the WHS OS to install on any box. Yup, Newegg sells it--http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16832116550

I've had a NAS and when it started dying, it was a major hassle to get my data off it. That's when I decided to go the WHS route. Other advantages are the automatic backups of your other computers, and duplication for all your shares.