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[coatsm]

I have a laptop and a desktop in my home with a 100 MB LAN.  I rip CDs mainly on my laptop and do a lot of tagging/orgainizing.  So far, I have simply compied the entire database (ripped 30+ CDs so far, long way to go).  This file transfer takes a long time (1 hr+) and I'm not sure if the playlists and tags copy over as well?

What is the best way to synch the database?  Is there way to do it so it only copies new or changed files to reduce the time?

(Thx, want to be able to enjoy the collection for listening in the kitchen)....

I hope I am not abusing this board.   :-/

This is my third message.  I have searched FAQ and the board but found nothing similar.  Hopefully these Qs are useful for others.  

[JimH]

You could use two different libraries on the laptop.  One for tagged files, one for newly ripped files.  This would give you a record of what you've done.

To copy, you could copy whole albums or artists to the other machine.  Windows may offer a way to copy files newer than a recent date, but I've never explored this possibility.

Tags will normally go with the files.  Playlists will not.  You're best off to build the playlists on the target machine.  They are stored in one of the jmd files in the MJ Program Files/Data directory.

[Mysticeti]

An hour for only 30 CDs?  That doesn't sound right to me. (?)  If there were about 50 minutes of music on each of those 30 CDs and you used MP3 compression at about 128Kbps quality you'd have roughly 1.5 GB of data, right?  You're not using a USB 1.1 network connector by any chance are you?

When we were ripping our CD collection we had two client PCs hooked up over a 10 MB LAN to a server in the basement.  Both clients had been configured such that ripped songs went over the LAN onto a network mounted drive in the basement.   Periodically we'd do an import on that server PC (that PC has it's Video and Audio outputs going to the hometheater in the den; a RF keyboard/mouse makes it useable).

By now there are probably better/more convenient solutions.  This was done a few years ago.

I haven't been keeping up with MC9 but maybe it has features which would help you (?).

[coatsm]

Yup, 1.26 GB and over a 100MB LAN.  Just doing a simple drag and drop copy w/in Windows Explorer.  The target PC is running Win98 and may not be properly configured.  I just figured is was crappy MSFT peer to peer networking..

But thanks for the suggestions.  I plan to do just what you suggest (put a server in the basement).   Thinking of doing a Linux server w/ Samba or some other access utility to mount the drive from our Windows PCs.    What are you running on your server?  And how far away can the server be to run the A/V outputs (assume RCA) to the stereo?  Great idea..

[Mysticeti]

Sorry for the long delay (I haven't been keeping up with the board lately).

Anyway, yes, I'm running the audio and video into a home theater system.  If you buy a fairly decent cable you can go quite a distance w/o significant signal loss.

I'm using a 30' optical cable for the audio.  It came with the HiFi-Link from http://www.xitel.com/ so there's no loss there (or ground hum).   The video is done over a long S-Video cable (cablestogo.com).  It looks fine to me.  It's hard to say if there's any signal loss.

The basement PC started out running 98SE but now runs XP.

[loraan]

I use RoboCopy, a Windows utility for more robust file copying, to synch my data between two machines. RoboCopy can copy an entire subdirectory tree, only copying files that have changed or that have a newer timestamp, for example. It can also delete files in the destination that don't exist in the source, thereby providing a "synch" of sorts.

What it wouldn't support, however, is true, two-way synching, where changes made in both locations are propagated between both locations.

To back up my machine, I robocopy my Music folder and my Data folder to the destination machine. The command line I use is:

robocopy "D:\My Music" "\\brandt\treehorn\My Music" /E /M /r:2 /w:1 /purge
robocopy "C:\Program Files\J River\Media Jukebox\Data" "\\brandt\brandt\Program Files\J River\Media Center\Data" /E /M /r:2 /w:1 /purge

The "/E" option tells robocopy to copy all subdirectories, even empty ones. "/M" tells it only to copy files with the Archive bit set, and then to clear the archive bit after copy. "/purge" tells it to delete files in the destination that don't exist in the source", so that if I delete a file on my main machine, robocopy also deletes it on the backup library.

Robocopy is available from a number of locations. Try this google search:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=robocopy

Joshua

[loraan]

By the way--two gold stars if you can figure out my naming convention for my machines from the paths in the above example