Portable installation in google drive
Posted: Thu Mar 30, 2017 6:14 pm
This is an interesting topic for people who are afraid of losing years of collecting music. Normally you would backup to an external hard drive manually; but this is time consuming and annoying. The alternative is cloud backup (but not without its own challenges). Google drive is one of the best choices since G music 1: does not support WAVs, 2: your broadband bill will go through the roof since there is only the cloud player, 3: I believe you cannot download your library once its up there?? I haven't tried drop box or similar auto back up competitors but G drive pricing is very good; $2.50 USD for 100GB.
I have managed to get this working but there have been many problems. I think I started with MM version 3.2 and it did not support different windows user names in the address of music files. Now in 3.6 It seems the paths work if the addresses are the same number of forward slashes away from C:/. I changed my playlist types to M3U and it seems okay. The exported playlist's addresses now have generic dots all the way up to the first parent folder of the tracks. It also helps that google drive is, by default, installed in the same location for all win 10 computers.
My wish has to do with uploading at the same time as using the program. Its just a guess: I think this causes the 'musicbeelibrary.bak', 'musicbeelibrarysettings.bak' etcetera to conflict if google drive is currently 'using' those files. MM smothers the crash (but displays an error when this occurs) and creates a duplicate file, for it to work on, with the string "[conflict]" appended to the file names. This creates a permanent desync between computers and who knows what will happen to your library if this state is allowed to reoccur? My wish is Mediamonkey should crash when it realises its settings files are in use elsewhere. Nothing of value will be lost and will perfect the cloud sync installation practice!
As luck would have it, MM Is still one of the only libraries out there that gets close to synchronized library support. It just needs to be acknowledged as a feature and supported by the developers.
I have managed to get this working but there have been many problems. I think I started with MM version 3.2 and it did not support different windows user names in the address of music files. Now in 3.6 It seems the paths work if the addresses are the same number of forward slashes away from C:/. I changed my playlist types to M3U and it seems okay. The exported playlist's addresses now have generic dots all the way up to the first parent folder of the tracks. It also helps that google drive is, by default, installed in the same location for all win 10 computers.
My wish has to do with uploading at the same time as using the program. Its just a guess: I think this causes the 'musicbeelibrary.bak', 'musicbeelibrarysettings.bak' etcetera to conflict if google drive is currently 'using' those files. MM smothers the crash (but displays an error when this occurs) and creates a duplicate file, for it to work on, with the string "[conflict]" appended to the file names. This creates a permanent desync between computers and who knows what will happen to your library if this state is allowed to reoccur? My wish is Mediamonkey should crash when it realises its settings files are in use elsewhere. Nothing of value will be lost and will perfect the cloud sync installation practice!
As luck would have it, MM Is still one of the only libraries out there that gets close to synchronized library support. It just needs to be acknowledged as a feature and supported by the developers.