shared library accross computers

[Benco]

Hi,

I use several computers at home, and my music is on a server, which I access through mapped drives (using the same letter on every computer). Which would be useful for me is the ability to share media library. More precisely, I would like to share both smart views and playlists, so that if I add a song in a playlist from one computer (or change the query of a smart view), the change is automatically applied to every computer.

I tried to use portable WACUP on a shared directory, but this solution has two drawbacks:
- it's very slow! loading WACUP from network drive makes it quite unresponsive
- the whole WACUP setup is shared, which doesn't work well since different computers use different resolutions (and thus different skins)

I guess my case is very specific, but maybe something can be done...

[dro]

I've had a similar thing mentioned before though that was looking more at everything but I'm not sure on a clear way to achieve this without needing some intermediary to do it or it being slow however its done.

As you ideally only need to copy the core library db & the playlists & the files defining the smart views which is simple enough to bundle up but it's then ensuring the correct version is used without it replacing a newer version &/or when things are out of sync. At least you've got the same filepaths between the setups as that makes moving things over a lot easier.

Am surprised it's being unresponsive if loading it from the drive - I'd expect it to be slow for the initial process loading as it needs to fetch the dlls, etc but once running then it shouldn't be hanging, etc (unless I'm mis-reading what you meant).

The only thing I can think off at the moment would be to make it easier to export just the files needed from one setup & allow them to be imported into another setup probably via some command-line option (which moves it into a backup/restore scenario which I've been thinking about doing natively as the more I do the more the Winamp targetted tool becomes less useful).

-dro

[Benco]

Hi,

For the responsiveness, I was surprised too, I thought it would be slow only when starting/

Maybe if the path to the ML directory could be specified in some configuration file, so that it could be placed on a network drive, but every other parts are specific to each computer. But I guess it wouldn't solve concurrent access to the ML content...

[zackbuffo]

the files defining the smart views

Sorry to hijack this thread for a short question: Can you provide the default path to these files?

[dro]

@zackbuffo: it's usually <wacup_settings_folder>\plugins\ml\views e.g. %appdata%\wacup\plugins\ml\views (normally install) or wacup\settings\plugins\ml\views (portable install)

however you also need the gen_ml.ini as that defines what local library smart views are shown.

@Benco: that was my thought as well but the live concurrency issue is the problem (same for the problems that occur with running multiple instances from the same WACUP install).

-dro

[zackbuffo]

Ah, I see. The queries for the smart views do not have their own files, but are all stored in the gen_ml.ini. Thanks for the hint.

[dro]

Not sure why it was done like that other than ease of parsing a single file but it's a behaviour I've got to maintain as I know there's some tooling out there that expects it.

-dro

[Benco]

Isn't it possible to lock the required file just when an update is needed ? I don't know how the new ML is implemented, but I know that works perfectly with SQLite (but maybe it can't be done with network storage...)