A solution! to keeping your DB on DropBox

[rlpowell]

(There are at least 4 other threads on this topic; I'm making this new one so my post to all the others (for people who have them subscribed via email) can just be a link to this and not toooo spammy).

This method may work for other cloud drive services as well. This method is specific to Windows.

*WARNING* *WARNING* *WARNING*

THIS CAN SERIOUSLY HOSE YOUR SETUP. BACK UP EVERYTHING. Especially do a Tools -> Scripts -> Export All Playlists.

Make sure you back up both AppData\Local and AppData\Roaming if you're on a windows that uses them; despite what http://www.mediamonkey.com/support/inde ... ticleid=17 says, on my systems the real database was in AppData\Roaming, *NOT* AppData\Local; I lost data because of this! Be careful! Check that what you think is the database has been recently updated!

For whatever reason, File -> Locate Moved/Missing Files has trouble with this method and static playlists; I ended up losing all my static playlist. I had to take the exports, search and replace to make them all point to \\localhost\C$ (see below), and use File -> Open to get them back.

*END WARNING*

OK, on with the setup.

First, go into MediaMonkey, and, assuming your username is rlpowell and your music folder is in the usual dropbox location for Windows 7 and is called "Music", do a File -> Add/Rescan Files To The Library..., and enter the location: \\localhost\C$\Users\rlpowell\Documents\My Dropbox\Music

That is a fake/virtual network drive, that always exists even if you have sharing turned off. It points to exactly the same place as C:\Users\rlpowell\Documents\My Dropbox\Music

Obviously, change the path to reflect your real situation; if you open up Windows Explorer and enter \\localhost\C$\ in the address bar, you can browse to the location you need, then if you click in the address bar you can copy the real location.

Whatever you pick, make sure it exists on both computers!, or this isn't going to work very well.

This should give you two locations in MediaMonkey under Music -> Location, and both should have all the DB information. Go browsing the localhost location in MediaMonkey and make sure that the songs have the data you expect, like ratings and stuff!

You can then try to select all songs in your static playlists and use File -> Locate Moved/Missing Files to point them at the \\localhost\C$\ location; good luck with that. If it doesn't work, see the search+replace method in the warning above.

Then go to Music -> Location, right click on the old location (i.e. not Network; anything that points at your old computer) and remove them from the library; now your MM knows *only* about the "virtual" drive.

Now set things up so that dropbox is the place that your MM DB is stored; this is the usual dropbox procedure per http://wiki.dropbox.com/TipsAndTricks/SyncOtherFolders, but like I said before, get both AppData\Local *AND* AppData\Roaming. First you move the MediaMonkey folder that has your actual database in it to DropBox, then copy anything you need from the other AppData location, then make the links. Here's my cmd session for that last part:

Code: Select all

C:\Users\rlpowell>cd C:\Users\rlpowell\AppData\Local

C:\Users\rlpowell\AppData\Local>mklink /j MediaMonkey "C:\Users\rlpowell\Documents\My Dropbox\MediaMonkey"
Junction created for MediaMonkey <<===>> C:\Users\rlpowell\Documents\My Dropbox\MediaMonkey

C:\Users\rlpowell\AppData\Local>cd ..\Roaming

C:\Users\rlpowell\AppData\Roaming>mklink /j MediaMonkey "C:\Users\rlpowell\Documents\My Dropbox\MediaMonkey"
Junction created for MediaMonkey <<===>> C:\Users\rlpowell\Documents\My Dropbox\MediaMonkey

C:\Users\rlpowell\AppData\Roaming>

Do this on both/all machines.

And that should do it; you should be able to do whatever you want and have it automatically synchronized between your machines. I'd be pretty careful about not running MM on more than one machine *at the same time*, but other than that this should just work, and even in that case since DropBox saves old copies it shoudln't be too bad to recover.

I am, of course, not responsible if you hose all your data this way.

-Robin

[Ironsack]

Does anyone know if this is still the solution for the new DB in MM4 or does that change things at all?

[rlpowell]

Does anyone know if this is still the solution for the new DB in MM4 or does that change things at all?

Well, I'm running 4.0.0.1418, so...

The problem certainly exists with MM4.

Note that my method has problems, in as much as MM and DropBox fight over the DB file, so it crashes a lot. Apparently MM has no error handling for the case where some other program has the DB open, i.e. it doesn't appear to retry cleanly.

-Robin

[rlpowell]

Dear Past Me,

I sure wish you'd explained *why* you're using the localhost network share instead of just pointing to C:\Users\rlpowell\Dropbox\Music\ , because current me has absolutely no idea.

Also, on the off chance anyone actually wants to try this:

1. Portable Mode install makes the whole thing much easier

OR

2. Use GoodSync to set up the local folders to sync with dropbox; this is my preferred method at this time as it has the considerable advantage of detecting conflicts between stuff happening on multiple hosts and asks you what to do.

[rlpowell]

Ah! The reason I had the music in a "network" share is that MediaMonkey (including MediaMonkey5, I'm sad to say) sees drives by their drive IDs and not by their drive letter, so if you have your music in C:\whatever, as soon as you run MM with the synced database on another computer, it *freaks out* because that drive is "gone", because each drive has a unique drive ID.

*sigh*

[rlpowell]

The whole network drive thing is slightly more complicated on MM5 because the UI won't let you mount such a path. So I edited the INI file, turning this:

Code: Select all

[AutoScan]
autoRemoveDeadLinks=0
autoRemoveAttributes=1
FolderCount=2
Path1=C:\Users\rlpowell\Dropbox\Music\
Subfolders1=1
ScanOnStart1=1
ConstantMonitoring1=1
MediaType1=-1

into this:

Code: Select all

[AutoScan]
autoRemoveDeadLinks=0
autoRemoveAttributes=1
FolderCount=2
Path1=C:\Users\rlpowell\Dropbox\Music\
Subfolders1=1
ScanOnStart1=1
ConstantMonitoring1=1
MediaType1=-1
Path2=\\localhost\C$\Users\rlpowell\Dropbox\Music-temp\
Subfolders2=1
ScanOnStart2=1
ConstantMonitoring2=1
MediaType2=-1

Then the "network" drive shows up in your "Locations" and you can move files between them by dragging between Location entries inside MM5.

Make sure you "Move All Content" when doing that or you'll lose your directory structure.