dealing with an external drive

[george]

Hi there,

Most of my music sits on an external drive, and I am using mt-daapd to, among other things, access it in itunes without adding it to my library. However, my external drive is often not connected to my computer, and when it is not, I have mt-daapd serve local files only. This works wonderfully — I have a musicroot directory with symlinks to the various places I have my music.

However, when I plug in my external drive, mt-daapd is forced to rescan all my music, which takes about 10 minutes.

Does anybody have a suggestion to help me here? Perhaps a way to keep a second cache on the external drive that can be read/updated when the second drive is plugged in? I imagine my situation is not uncommon — does anybody else have strategies for dealing with this problem?

Thanks!

[rpedde]

@george wrote:

Does anybody have a suggestion to help me here? Perhaps a way to keep a second cache on the external drive that can be read/updated when the second drive is plugged in? I imagine my situation is not uncommon — does anybody else have strategies for dealing with this problem?

Short answer is no, and I can’t think of something that might help (other than running two copies, one with a database for the external drive, and another with the “rest” of the files.)

But that really isn’t a bad idea at all… marking a drive as “removable”, and not purging those files from the database when the drive is offline.

Might be neat to be able to plug in an iPod or something and have it start sharing automagically.

[Sherlock]

@rpedde wrote:

But that really isn’t a bad idea at all… marking a drive as “removable”, and not purging those files from the database when the drive is offline.
.

I am so new around here, I hate to speak up too much since I know I am only beginning to learn about the capabilities of mt-daapd. However, one item I have already been wondering about is ‘multiple music libraries’. In my case, I have a very large Christmas Music database that naturally I have no reason to keep online for about 11 months out of the year. However, being able to simply plug in a second USB drive with the Christmas music would be great. But then again, maybe it would be best to have a ‘second copy’ (server?) as I really only want to deal with Christmas music when I want to listen to it.

Another use would be for when I want to ‘borrow’ some of my sons music. They are grown and have their own music libraries, but it is very easy to copy their music to a USB drive and bring home with me. However, I would prefer to keep their music seperate from mine unless I decide to move specific albums to my library.

I have been able to manage this (to some degree) with Musicmatch since it allows you to maintain multiple music libraries. The only problem with their implementation is that you have to select which library to load from the software on the PC. There is no way to change music libraries from a Soundbridge.

[fizze]

But that really isn’t a bad idea at all… marking a drive as “removable”, and not purging those files from the database when the drive is offline.

Might be neat to be able to plug in an iPod or something and have it start sharing automagically.

Wow, that would indeed own!
Message handling to recognize the plugging-in of said device shouldnt be too hard (at least in *IX), and maybe its as easy as extending the DB with 1 field (available yes/no)….. 😉

I like the idea.

[rpedde]

@fizze wrote:

But that really isn’t a bad idea at all… marking a drive as “removable”, and not purging those files from the database when the drive is offline.

Might be neat to be able to plug in an iPod or something and have it start sharing automagically.

Wow, that would indeed own!
Message handling to recognize the plugging-in of said device shouldnt be too hard (at least in *IX), and maybe its as easy as extending the DB with 1 field (available yes/no)….. 😉

I like the idea.

Of course, the unix way to do would be to use dbus or something to start a daemon with a config for that device, and shut it down on a dbus remove, so the proposed solution is a very windows solution. 🙂

[fizze]

well, as if I would care 😉

well, it would be cool to control this just for certain devices, or device classes via web interface of course.
so that the printer that i turn on aint scanned for mp3 files from mt-daapd 😉

[Sherlock]

@rpedde wrote:

Short answer is no, and I can’t think of something that might help (other than running two copies, one with a database for the external drive, and another with the “rest” of the files.)

Would it be technically possible to run two copies of mt-daapd on a single NSLU2?

[george]

I’ve also seem to come across a bug recently that makes the mt-daapd process unresponsive after the external drive is disconnected. I’m tracking it down now with -d9, though I expect quite a large log file to trudge through. Anybody seen this issue?

[rpedde]

@Sherlock wrote:

Would it be technically possible to run two copies of mt-daapd on a single NSLU2?

Technically, yes. You’d need to make two config files, with two different db_parms (directories), different ports, different names, and different mp3_dirs. You could share admin-roots.

Should work fine.

— Ron

[indierocksteve]

@rpedde wrote:

@george wrote:

But that really isn’t a bad idea at all… marking a drive as “removable”, and not purging those files from the database when the drive is offline.

Might be neat to be able to plug in an iPod or something and have it start sharing automagically.

I’d love to see this, its why I looked for something like Firefly to begin with, iTunes won’t share iPod music and I’m trying to get this to work.

[Author]

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