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[ckewinjones]

What is the best way to keep two copies of MC -- one on our home server and the other on a laptop -- synchronized with the same files?  I have searched around Interact and the Wiki and I am not sure what the right way to do this is.

I manage my music library using MC17 running on a server in my basement.  MC17 and its library are on one server and the physical files are on another server (UnRAID).  I listen to the music on my desktop system (running MC17 as a client), on various DLNA devices around the home, or on my phone using Gizmo.  Everything works great and I am a happy JRiver camper.

My wife's music library is on her laptop, managed by iTunes.  Ninety percent or more of her music is the same as mine, and it's my job to keep her iTunes up to date with what's on the MC17 server anytime either of us gets any new albums.  Syncing MC17 and iTunes is, in my experience, tricky, labour-intensive, and error-prone.  I'd like to stop doing that.  So my goal is to install MC17 on my wife's laptop, and let MC17 take care of keeping her laptop-based library synchronized with our server-based library.

She does most of her music listening when the laptop is offline -- not on our home network nor on the public internet (so WebGizmo is not a solution).  What I need is a quick and easy way to copy files from the basement server to her laptop so they are available to her MC17 instance when her laptop is offline.

Should I be using File>Library>Sync Library ... or Tools>Library Tools>Rename, Move, and Copy Files ... ?  And will either of these choices allow me to use a smartlist or view scheme to limit the synch to the music she likes (since she doesn't care for Frank Zappa nearly as much as I do)?

Please advise.

[rjm]

I sync MC on my desktop to my laptop every day. My comments will be terse because it sounds like you know what you are doing. Just ask if you want more detail.

1) Sync music files on desktop with laptop. Desktop and laptop must use the same drive letter, folder structure, and file names. You can choose to copy only a subset of music to laptop. If you do this, consider adding a custom user field for identifying wife's music subset. Then create a new music view for wife that displays only music from her subset. You could also move the music in this subset to a new root folder using MC's rename move and copy feature. Having wife's music in separate root folder would simplify syncing this subset to laptop using 3rd party sync tool.

2) Copy all files from MC library location on desktop to MC library location on laptop. Note: This assumes that you want wife to use your library and and that wife never tags music. It also assumes wife does not want to maintain play counts, etc. It is possible to exclude one file from the copy if wife wants to maintain her own playlists however all other data created or edited by wife will be lost.

3) Copy all thumbnail files from desktop thumbnail cache location to laptop thumbnail cache location. You can skip this step if you don't care if laptop has to rebuild thumbnails. I do care because my cache is large. I use a program called Super Flexible File Synchronizer (SFFS) which only copies the portions of files that have changed which dramatically speeds up syncing my 4GB cache since MC typically changes very little in this file.

Repeat steps 1-3 daily or as required.

Tip: SFFS has a nice interface for automating these 3 sync steps.

Tip: During initial setup of this procedure you might want to restore a library backup on the laptop to use all MC settings from the desktop.

Tip: If you go on vacation with the laptop and do a bunch of tagging, just reverse the direction of the sync for all 3 steps when you return home to bring your desktop up to date.

[ckewinjones]

rjm,

Thanks, this is very helpful.  You not only answered the question that I asked, but you helped me realize the question I should have asked instead.

My comments will be terse because it sounds like you know what you are doing.

Having been a software engineer for almost 30 years, if I don't know what I am doing by now, I never will.

The key thing you said that helped me understand what I was really looking for was this:

Note: This assumes that you want wife to use your library and and that wife never tags music. It also assumes wife does not want to maintain play counts, etc.

This is true.  In fact, not only does she never tag music, rate individual tracks, create playlists, etc., but for the most part, neither do I.  What this note made me realize is that I really don't care about syncing the information that is kept in the MC17 database.  All I care about is making sure the physical files on her laptop match the physical files on the unRAID server, and I don't need to (and probably shouldn't) use MC17 itself to do that.  I just need to find (or write) a small utility that runs when her laptop is online on the home network and watches the server directories for changes.  Once the files are in sync, MC17's auto-import will watch those directories and add any new files to its database.

I'll look at SFFS but I will probably end up writing my own to get exactly the behaviour that I want.

Thanks again.

[tizul91]

Hello guys,

I had the same need and have done the same way at the beginning. I worked well.
I considered changing the configuration for 2 reasons:
- need to add a 2nd physical copy of the files on my NAS (actually, a 3rd as I backup my NAS monthly)
- need to keep a local copy of files on the "Playing" PC, but not on main partition

I searched and I retained a solution with SyncBackFree with a specific configuration.
- I sync only the necessary files and do not propagate the deletion of files (I must delete the on both sides manually, it's only a precaution of mine)
It's easy to setup and once operational, a batch job does it daily.
The auto-import function of MC correctly propagates the tagging of files on both sides.

Note: Windows remote Sync seems to work works only with a database on C: partition on the synched side (laptop in your case). Not sure if one can change this, I simply didn't figure out how to redirect the target on another hosting partition.
(I never use C: as a destination for data files - backup strategy and cloning reasons mainly).

Thanks.