mmw5 to mms5 - how to migrate library ? [#15183]

[Teknojnky]

So I finally had time to try out the latest mm5 and mms, and wanted to provide my experience so far.

MM5 successfully imported my very old MM library db of ~1.6 gb.

I was able to explore around the mm5 interface and play various playlists and such.

I moved on to MMS, installed nodejs to my nas (readynas 528x/debian jessie).

Created an /apps/mms and copied the binaries from the mms download link, and set them +x.

I started up mms ./mms and received an exception error about unable to open database file (obviously because never ran before) and it appeared to freeze, so I control-C to cancel.

I then re-ran ./mms and received some more errors, apparently due to not understanding that a new database was being created and I did not give it enough time (no console messages to indicate anything going on), that db was corrupted.

I then proceeded to look for the newly created db, which was not in the /app/mms folder with the executables, but I found it at /root/MediaMonkeyServer/mms.db (yes I know running as root is bad, but I don't have any ssh users for the nas).

I removed the MMS db folder and restarted ./mms and gave it a few seconds and it displayed the running message and to connect via web or MM5.

I started with the web page to check it out. I was able to remove the default non-existent collections and add a new test collection with a small subset of music, which seemed to scan on its own and I was able to navigate the various web pages.

Since there is no 'all' sub-section, I had to drill down into the various sub pages to see the actual tracks.

Tracks showed the metadata fine, but I was somewhat disappointed to see that the paths and filenames are not the native/actual path/filename, but instead are apparently a UPNP abstraction of them.

IE path = http://ip:port/cds/content/114.flac

Which follows, when I used MM5, it showed the mms server as a upnp server under devices & services.

All of this brought me to the conclusion, that mms is not really going to be a replacement for mm5, but more so a sync target of your main mm5 library, which can then stand alone and serve out to other clients (mm5/unpnp/etc).

Given that mms is unpn based, that means it will be difficult or impossible to have all of the file management capabilities of mm5, but in a client/server format.

I have not yet tested any of the sync functionality, since syncing is not really my goal.

All my media is stored on the server, to which MM5 access \\server\media\audio\* and I can manage everything in MM over the network path.

However with MMS, the music path is going to be local: /data/media/audio

This is of course the same issue between MM and plex.

I don't know if mms can directly use an mm5 db that is copied to the server, but even if it could, in my case, the paths are different so it would not find any of the files, unless it understood that it was importing a db with remote files and making them local.

Sooo, long story even longer, mms is not the solution I was looking for. Basically I would love to have MM use a remote mysql or similar database, that is accessible simultaneously from multiple mm clients.

Like back in the MM2 days, when you could connect to a remote access database (even if it wasn't thread-safe).

But MMS may be a solution for others in certain scenarios, mainly if they have a lot of UPNP clients they want to serve music to, but on a headless server without having to run MM on a desktop.

[jiri]

MMS provides the UPnP interface particularly to be available to various platforms. That said, there are more MM(5) only functions available, so that we can achieve the ultimate goal - that MMS tracks can be managed as local tracks, i.e. they can be tagged by MM5, etc. There might be some features missing yet, but generally speaking I think that MMS should be very well usable for your usecase.

Jiri

[Teknojnky]

sounds good.

is plans to support directly migrating a mmw5 db to a mms db (taking into account potential path changes) ?

my goal is to have one centralized library db, and not have to constantly sync between desktop and server.

[Ludek]

Hi, yes,
we are planning a wizard for MMS > MM5 migration for the next versions.
Part of this will be also ability to migrate just metadata for tracks that are already accessible by MMS (i.e. whenever there is no need to upload them from MM5 > MMS).

EDIT: tracked as https://www.ventismedia.com/mantis/view.php?id=15183