Managing 2 Libraries - lossless and lossy

[skohlmey]

First of all, Thanks to everyone who takes the time to contribute to this board! I have searched for previous answers and haven't found any. Feel free to point me in the right direction.

My question is what is the best way to manage two “libraries” of music – one lossless for the hi-fi and one lossy/mp3 for portable devices?

As the techy of the house I manage the music libraries for my wife, kids, and myself. All of our music (14K songs) is stored on a NAS in wav and flac files. I use MM 4.1 gold to manage the library. It has been great to me for over 8 years. I also maintain a second library of mp3 files for the multitude of different portable devices that we use (flash drives, iPods, iPhone, androids, sansa, etc…). Maintaining two libraries and keeping things consistent between them is a pain! My usual process is to add new material to the lossless library and then use MM to convert and store a mp3 version in the other library. But if I make future changes to tag information or filenames in one library I have to remember to replicate those changes in the other library. I am wondering if smarter people have a better process for achieving my end goal??: two sources of identical music – one lossless and one lossy. What about the “Auto Sync” function in MM? Could I use this feature to accomplish my goal? Thanks for your input!!

[Lowlander]

Auto-Sync can convert on the fly so no need to manage a lossy Library.

[skohlmey]

Auto-Sync can convert on the fly so no need to manage a lossy Library.

I have thought about that.... Except some people don't want to use MM to load their players, phones, etc. Having a second library of lossless gives 2 important benefits for a family: A) people can access/use it with whatever program they want (i.e. itunes, wmp, playstation, ...) and B) it keeps people out of my main lossless library and prevents mistakes that are hard to recover from (inadvertently deleting files, re-tagging, etc)

If it was just me, MM would be all I ever use and I would sync my devices right to it.

[Lowlander]

Then you can sync to any drive letter location: http://www.mediamonkey.com/addons/brows ... e-plug-in/

[skohlmey]

Thanks Lowlander! I am doing some testing and I think this will work for me. I wish I would have asked about this years ago.

[skohlmey]

Sorry to bug you again. ugh. But after some testing on a small sub-set of my library I am having a couple of issues. Thanks for taking the time to read this! First here a quick run-down of what I am doing:

• - Syncing (echoing) to a shared file folder on the same PC (one-way only)
  - Using the d_WMDM.dll plug-in; started with unknown device profile
  - One conversion rule: Any audio above 192kbps is converted to MP3 VBR ~192
  - Files location for Music on my device: F:\Test Music\<Album Artist>\<Album>\<Track> - <Title>
  - All check boxes on Tagging tab are checked
  - Nothing checked on sync playlists tab (not worried about playlists now)
  - Delete other files and playlist from the device is checked (as is Confirm Deletion)

Results: The first Auto sync worked perfectly. All the files were converted and copied to the new location with their artwork. Even got the bonus of folder.jpg files.

Then I begin testing the “synchronize” capability of Auto Sync by running it several more times. Sometimes I quit and restarted MM between test runs. It didn’t always work like I would expect. I am hoping that I am doing something wrong here and you can point out my mistakes. Here are some things I noticed:

• - Auto syncing seems to convert every file again – even when no changes were made to the original files, tags or library in MM. This takes a long time for a large number of files.
  - However, the newly converted song files do not replace the identical song files in my device directory. (This is good I guess since no update was needed)
  - Making changes to an existing song in your library (such as revising the song tag or filename) are not being propagated to my device when auto sync is run. Even though the Auto-Sync process runs through every song and converts it again.
  - Usually I had to restart MM in order to get the Auto-sync function to actually run. Making changes to my library and then immediately running auto-sync would result in a millisecond notification in the progress bar and then nothing. Running after MM is restarted results in a full run.
  - Having the File deletion checkbox selected seems to do nothing.

In other words, the initial conversion worked perfectly. But as far as “synching” goes, I am at a loss for getting this to work properly. My initial thoughts are that Auto-Sync is converting files before it determines if the files need to be updated. In my opinion this is backwards and makes it impractical for a very large library. Secondly, changes to files or tags in my main library are not being propagated to my device. Any ideas you have would be awesome because this tool could replace a lot of manual work and old VB scripts that I currently use to maintain the second lossy library.

[Lowlander]

Are you using d_WMDM or d_USBMass? What device and which version of MediaMonkey?

[skohlmey]

MM 4.1.11, d_WMDM, device is a hard drive

[Lowlander]

I'm not sure if d_WMDM is meant to do this, usually d_USBMass is used for hard drive sync.

[skohlmey]

I am trying it now...

<edit>
At first I thought it wasn't working better. But after more careful review (too many windows open ) it looks like this might be working better. I will do some more careful testing this evening and report back. Thanks for pointing me in the right direction.

[skohlmey]

Sorry it took me so long to get back. I have played with the sync function in the hopes that it could replace my own custom code for maintaining a MP3 library (on the hard drive) of my lossless music. Unfortunately, IMO, the sync function is not ready for prime-time.

Unlike most of MM (which I think is fantastic) the sync function's awkward user interface and poor documentation makes it impossible to really understand what is really happening. I found the result to be sometimes unpredictable (examples: updated files ignored, unselected files copied, old versions of files left behind...). These results could be caused by my lack of understanding or bugs in the code. In either case, I can't trust the sync function with the care of my large library. I know I can trust my own scripts and I will keep using them.

Thanks Lowlander for your help.