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[Lunatique]

I'd like to know if there is a way to do this:

Basically, I have a gigantic music collection that's several hundred gigabytes on an external drive, and that's my "main library." I then made a smart playlist of only songs that I have rated to be 4 stars or more (roughly about 23 GB or so total)--those are my favorite songs of all time. Then, I tried to select all the songs in the playlist (while in MC) and simply drag and drop it to the local hard drive of my laptop (in Explorer), so that I can always have my favorite songs on the laptop when I travel. But what happens is that those songs in the playlist are all then just put into the same folder on the laptop, and since many of my tracks aren't properly named, it becomes much harder to find them. In my main library, even if the tracks are properly name, they are at least placed in proper folder directories for various musical genres and artists and albums.

So my question is--how can I copy the tracks in the smart playlist to another hard drive but keep the same folder directory structure for all the tracks?

[WinoOutWest]

I do pretty much exactly this by setting up my music directory on my portable drive as a Handheld in MC.  I then select a few smartlists and let MC sync the files instead of dragging and dropping.  In the Options for the handheld you can define the structure of that folder as it syncs. 

[Lunatique]

Thanks for the tip. I was looking at the handheld options and I can't quite tell how you can set it up to perfectly mirror the folder directory structure of the source library. Can you elaborate on that a bit?

[WinoOutWest]

Well for my portable listening I don't actually replicate the structure exactly.  I use smartlists and the playlists get synced and then I use the playlist to play the media.  My structure becomes Artist/Album structure on the portable.  This works better for me because I've been collecting music since my days with a 40GB hard drive so my core library has stuff all over the place in different directories.  With the advent of 2TB drives I should probably clean it up but with MC I can do and find everything without worrying about where it is so I haven't bothered.

That being said I have used a full copy of my library on my laptop but for that I created fake drive mappings on my laptop to mimic the server drives and then use a 3rd party sync tool to keep the folders, content and library files sync'd (SyncBack)

[MusicHawk]

I created fake drive mappings on my laptop to mimic the server drives and then use a 3rd party sync tool to keep the folders, content and library files sync'd (SyncBack)

I do exactly the same thing (also using SyncBackSE). It's faster and easier then having MC sync, and it also lets me copy views and playlists and whatever else I need on my laptop. It's a one-way copy, not a true sync, but that's exactly what I want.

That said, it would be wonderful if MC's portable Sync tool could, as an option, have a checkbox that does this: "Create and use exact Library media source paths and filenames on Sync destination". This simple option would eliminate all the work of configuring paths and names in the Sync dialog just to get to what MC already knows.

[rick.ca]

Curious about how this works, I just tried using RemoveLeft([Filename (path)],2)\ as the path to use on the "handheld." That didn't work on the initial conversion, but when I deleted the handheld contents and synced again, it properly recreated the original folders. Sort of—they're all recreated in a Audio\J River Conversion Cache folder...OIC, that's because they're converted. If there is no conversion, they go directly to the correct folders. Am I missing something—would this not work fine if there's no conversion involved?

But if I did want them converted, how would I get it to create/update the conversion cache, then update the handheld—using just the original folder names?