Moving a portable library

Get answers about using MediaMonkey 4 for Windows.

Moderator: Gurus

captain paranoia
Posts: 73
Joined: Wed Jul 07, 2010 1:41 pm

Moving a portable library

Post by captain paranoia »

My portable MP3 library has now got too big for the 500GB drive I had it on.

So I copied everything to a new 1TB drive.

Now the portable MM installation on the new drive can't find the previous portable disk, so none of the library is visible.

The library move script and file insert only offer the new drive as a local disk, not a portable disk.

How do I convince the portable MM installation on the new disk that the new disk is the portable drive...?

Thanks.
Peke
Posts: 17446
Joined: Tue Jun 10, 2003 7:21 pm
Location: Earth
Contact:

Re: Moving a portable library

Post by Peke »

Hi,
If you cloned File Structure to New drive and you haven't scan it, then simply Select Bunch of tracks 100 for example and do File -> Locate Moved/missing tracks while pointing to new drive and MMW should repair drive Links.

Do not forget to backup MM.DB just in case.
Best regards,
Peke
MediaMonkey Team lead QA/Tech Support guru
Admin of Free MediaMonkey addon Site HappyMonkeying
Image
Image
Image
How to attach PICTURE/SCREENSHOTS to forum posts
captain paranoia
Posts: 73
Joined: Wed Jul 07, 2010 1:41 pm

Re: Moving a portable library

Post by captain paranoia »

Ah, that needs a gold licence.

Looks like I'll just have to do a clean portable install and rebuild the library.
Peke
Posts: 17446
Joined: Tue Jun 10, 2003 7:21 pm
Location: Earth
Contact:

Re: Moving a portable library

Post by Peke »

Hi,
In that case unless you decide to support us rebuild is only choice.
Best regards,
Peke
MediaMonkey Team lead QA/Tech Support guru
Admin of Free MediaMonkey addon Site HappyMonkeying
Image
Image
Image
How to attach PICTURE/SCREENSHOTS to forum posts
ITgreybeard
Posts: 36
Joined: Sat Feb 04, 2012 6:52 pm
Location: WA USA

Re: Moving a portable library

Post by ITgreybeard »

Hey Capn -

Just wanted to put in my 2 cents for Gold. I made the investment in the lifetime version several years back, and have been eternally grateful - to my :D self - for having done so, and of course to Ventis Media for continuing to make MM a fab product. But I too waited a few years. Anyway, it's worth it when you can. Be well.
ITgreybeard : MM Lifetime Gold on Win10Pro, always the latest production release unless noted otherwise. My carryaround is an AMD-based Lenovo Yoga 6 w 8c/16t, 16GB mem and .5 TB ssd. NAS is an Intel-based Lenovo X1 Yoga Gen3 with 4c/8t, 16GB mem and .5TB ssd running Win10Pro, with many storage volumes (40TB) attached via Thunderbolt 3. Other towers and laptops can chime in as called for.
captain paranoia
Posts: 73
Joined: Wed Jul 07, 2010 1:41 pm

Re: Moving a portable library

Post by captain paranoia »

> In that case unless you decide to support us rebuild is only choice.

That's perfectly fair.

But it reminds me that if I'm deleting the library and starting from scratch, I might as well install a portable version of MusicBee, since I much prefer its playback interface, and that's all this portable library will be used for.

I still recommend MM; did so only the other day on Audiokarma. The forum users there seem very keen on JRiver (and Winamp & Foobar...), so it's nice to be able to suggest something different (MM doesn't seem to be mentioned there, well, except by me...).
ITgreybeard
Posts: 36
Joined: Sat Feb 04, 2012 6:52 pm
Location: WA USA

Re: Moving a portable library

Post by ITgreybeard »

Got it. Makes sense to me. I use MM mostly to catalog content and then push it to other devices.
ITgreybeard : MM Lifetime Gold on Win10Pro, always the latest production release unless noted otherwise. My carryaround is an AMD-based Lenovo Yoga 6 w 8c/16t, 16GB mem and .5 TB ssd. NAS is an Intel-based Lenovo X1 Yoga Gen3 with 4c/8t, 16GB mem and .5TB ssd running Win10Pro, with many storage volumes (40TB) attached via Thunderbolt 3. Other towers and laptops can chime in as called for.
Peke
Posts: 17446
Joined: Tue Jun 10, 2003 7:21 pm
Location: Earth
Contact:

Re: Moving a portable library

Post by Peke »

Hi,
Winamp is dead player foobar as much as it is popular is bit outdated in design, MusicBee and MMW can be overhead as players.

NOTE having library based on Drive letter is ticking bomb as you can't ever know when Windows would decide to assign new drive letter.

I tried MusicBee and it is far inferior to what I do with MMW scripts and very limited in some aspects.

As a plain simple player I was seriously surprised with AIMP sound quality and startup speed (excluding my own Simple player plugin for MMW that starts and play track in <300ms) and whole BASS Sound processing engine it uses and features it is capable of.
Best regards,
Peke
MediaMonkey Team lead QA/Tech Support guru
Admin of Free MediaMonkey addon Site HappyMonkeying
Image
Image
Image
How to attach PICTURE/SCREENSHOTS to forum posts
captain paranoia
Posts: 73
Joined: Wed Jul 07, 2010 1:41 pm

Re: Moving a portable library

Post by captain paranoia »

> I tried MusicBee and it is far inferior to what I do with MMW scripts and very limited in some aspects.

As a user, I don't really care about scripting.

But if you want some honest feedback, then I'd say MB is better as a player, because the look and feel is better. I can change the size of artwork.

In album art view, I can still select individual tracks for playback. That's a simple, but killer feature.

MB's metadata and artwork fetcher is much better than anything I've seen in MM.

I'd suggest you have a closer look at MB again; it improves continuously. I'd suggest you have things to learn from it.

> NOTE having library based on Drive letter is ticking bomb as you can't ever know when Windows would decide to assign new drive letter.

Yes you can; you use Disk Management to fix the drive letter for a given device. Or, if you're using a NAS and mapped drives like I do, Windows never changes the drive mappings.
Peke
Posts: 17446
Joined: Tue Jun 10, 2003 7:21 pm
Location: Earth
Contact:

Re: Moving a portable library

Post by Peke »

HI,
captain paranoia wrote:As a user, I don't really care about scripting.
The scripting and customization is bone of any application that wants to evolve beyond design.
captain paranoia wrote:But if you want some honest feedback, then I'd say MB is better as a player, because the look and feel is better. I can change the size of artwork.
:oops: That is right I added it as https://www.ventismedia.com/mantis/view.php?id=14807
captain paranoia wrote:In album art view, I can still select individual tracks for playback. That's a simple, but killer feature.
Select art and details and you can play any track you want, also you can control Play now behavior from MMW option
captain paranoia wrote:MB's metadata and artwork fetcher is much better than anything I've seen in MM.
I guess you haven't tried MM5?
captain paranoia wrote:I'd suggest you have a closer look at MB again; it improves continuously. I'd suggest you have things to learn from it.
Initially when MusicBee was released while MMW was already mature project, many users gave us feedback that it is cloning MMW, but I'm glad that they took different approach and made good product and put effort in it, simply it doesn't feel like MMW and lack one feature to give it my personal touch in order to make it my app of choice. Still a nice product, with ok features and good solutions.
captain paranoia wrote:Yes you can; you use Disk Management to fix the drive letter for a given device. Or, if you're using a NAS and mapped drives like I do, Windows never changes the drive mappings.
I have all my library on NAS, accessing from multiple PCs, TVs, Phones, Tablets, IoT-s. Mapping drive letters is outdated and you need to set it up on each PC exactly the same like on first one and it is not usable on Android, iOS, Smart TVs, Linux where UNC path handling works flawlessly and installing MMW as portable on External SSD makes library truly portable. LAN Sharing has evolved from mapped drive letters.
Best regards,
Peke
MediaMonkey Team lead QA/Tech Support guru
Admin of Free MediaMonkey addon Site HappyMonkeying
Image
Image
Image
How to attach PICTURE/SCREENSHOTS to forum posts
captain paranoia
Posts: 73
Joined: Wed Jul 07, 2010 1:41 pm

Re: Moving a portable library

Post by captain paranoia »

> The scripting and customization is bone of any application that wants to evolve beyond design

If you want to allow third-party add-ons, yes. Otherwise, you just code it up and compile it...
I do use a number of 3rd party add-ons, so I guess I do care about scripting...

> Select art and details and you can play any track you want

But I don't want to view by art and details; that is too limiting on the number of albums I can easily see at one time. And it doesn't show all tracks easily if there are more than a dozen or so tracks in an album. Scrolling by album art, selecting an album, displaying the tracks in that album, and allowing selection is a much nicer and more intuitive (IMHO) UI.

> I guess you haven't tried MM5?

No, I confess I haven't. It seems to have been in beta for years. To be fair to you, I ought to give it a try. I think I was waiting for it to come out of beta, and I had considered at that point buying a version licence, rather than a lifetime licence. But, since it was in beta for so long, and MB looked pretty good, I switched to MB.

> Mapping drive letters is outdated and you need to set it up on each PC exactly the same like on first one

Since it's a one-off operation, it's hardly a difficult task... And only needs to be consistent if you need the same drive letters on each PC.

> and it is not usable on Android, iOS, Smart TVs, Linux where UNC path handling works flawlessly

And that's where I use UNC path handling; they're not Windows, so don't need to support mapped drive letters.

Mapped drive letters work very nicely on Windows, whether it's an 'old skool' method or not. It makes a NAS behave just like any other locally-connected drive, and works with s/w that may not like UNC addressing.

I only use a portable install for genuinely portable installations; so I can take my music library, and plug it into any Windows PC, and have it play. My main library at home is on a NAS, so I can access it from any number of network-connected devices; PCs;, tablets, phones, Android TV boxes, streaming receivers, etc.

> Initially when MusicBee was released while MMW was already mature project, many users gave us feedback that it is cloning MMW, but I'm glad that they took different approach and made good product and put effort in it

Well, it's a media manager/player, so it will look like most other media managers/players, MM included. CoverFlow/MonkeyFlow, anyone...? But it 'thinks' in a different way to MM. Sometimes this is good, sometimes not so good (e.g. MB doesn't support physical library management at all well; that's when I drop back to MM). And 'they' is just one guy, Stephen, in his spare time.
Post Reply