What’s the best way to manage my library?

[bobinchicago]

I’ve got Firefly SVN-1586 running on a Linkstation Live. Got the share up and running, everything’s peachy. The clients see it, the songs are there, and I’ll be turning off iTunes’ music sharing a little later.

My Linkstation library has a lot of stuff I don’t really need — for instance, in iTunes I had AIFF and AAC versions of many items so I could hear higher-quality versions at home but have compact versions on my iPod.

Firefly’s completed the first full scan. At this point I’d like to go in and delete the AAC version of those duplicates, along with whatever else I’m unlikely to listen to via my SoundBridges.

Is there an optimal method for deletion, or can I just open the share’s window in the Finder (Mac OS X 10.4.10) and command-delete to my heart’s content?

If so, aside from inadvertently deleting anything I don’t want to…, are there any “just make sure I don’t…” type warnings? Or is this really just a situation where I can delete away and I don’t have to worry about any gotchas biting me in the ass down the road? (This is my first NAS, aside from an unsuccessful attempt at getting a Slug running. At least I can use that drive to back up the Linkstation.)

One way or another, am I better off telling Firefly to do a full scan again once my duplicates are gone, or is the Web interface’s regular scan sufficient? Or can I just let the regular automated scan handle it, as long as the half-hour wait isn’t some awful burden for me?

And finally (while this isn’t a Firefly question per se, I’ll hope it’s a Firefly management and compatibility question) I gather that, to add music to the Linkstation library, I just drag the folder over to the iTunes Music folder on the share, using the standard artist-album-song hierarchy. (Making sure the tags have been created with my favorite utility for doing that, of course.) Am I an optimist or is it really that easy?

Thanks for any help. And thanks very much to the folks who’ve gotten the software working and documented it for n00bs like myself. (And thanks as well to the folks who worked on the Unslung version. I still think I was very close to getting it working, but I just couldn’t find that one “Aha!” solution.)

[rpedde]

@bobinchicago wrote:

Is there an optimal method for deletion, or can I just open the share’s window in the Finder (Mac OS X 10.4.10) and command-delete to my heart’s content?

That will work. If you want to keep the data there (for backup purposes) but don’t want to have to see it in firefly, you can remove .m4a from the extensions list and it will drop off the library. But that presupposes you don’t want to see *any* m4a files.

If so, aside from inadvertently deleting anything I don’t want to…, are there any “just make sure I don’t…” type warnings? Or is this really just a situation where I can delete away and I don’t have to worry about any gotchas biting me in the ass down the road? (This is my first NAS, aside from an unsuccessful attempt at getting a Slug running. At least I can use that drive to back up the Linkstation.)

Nope, should be good, assuming this is a COPY of the data, of course, and not the only copies you have of it.

One way or another, am I better off telling Firefly to do a full scan again once my duplicates are gone, or is the Web interface’s regular scan sufficient? Or can I just let the regular automated scan handle it, as long as the half-hour wait isn’t some awful burden for me?

Any of the three are okay. I’d use the web interface, as it’s easiest, but any way you want to let the scan happen should work.

And finally (while this isn’t a Firefly question per se, I’ll hope it’s a Firefly management and compatibility question) I gather that, to add music to the Linkstation library, I just drag the folder over to the iTunes Music folder on the share, using the standard artist-album-song hierarchy. (Making sure the tags have been created with my favorite utility for doing that, of course.) Am I an optimist or is it really that easy?

That’s about it, except for kicking off a rescan, or letting the background scan happen. For me, I hate waiting for the background scan to happen, so I set my rescans to either 0, or some long number (once day) and manually scan when I add new music.

You don’t have to really add it in any organized fashion, either. You can just dump it in there, and it will work fine.

— Ron

[bobinchicago]

Well, cool. Thanks for the answers, Ron; this is going to be spectacularly low maintenance, then.

Incidentally, I did find something last night, although I’ll let you decide whether it’s a bug, feature, or just working as designed. 😉 In the above post I mention,

in iTunes I had AIFF and AAC versions of many items

In my iTunes library, so I could easily distinguish between them, I’d use just the standard album title for the AAC version, and append AIFF to the album title in that format. Of course, iTunes dutifully created a folder in the artist’s folder with each version; one folder would be named After Awhile and the other would be After Awhile AIFF, for instance. At least in SVN 1586, Firefly seems to see the space and AIFF in the folder name as a file extension and (I assume because the object isn’t what Firefly expects to have that extension) not index it or its contents.

Once I’ve cleared out the AAC duplicates (and I am keeping backups), I’ll rename the folders and reindex, so it’ll work just fine. And I suspect maybe there are zero to, oh maybe two at the high end? people on Earth who’ll also do this particular sequence of events. But I figured I’d pass it along.

[rpedde]

@bobinchicago wrote:

Well, cool. Thanks for the answers, Ron; this is going to be spectacularly low maintenance, then.

Incidentally, I did find something last night, although I’ll let you decide whether it’s a bug, feature, or just working as designed. 😉 In the above post I mention,

in iTunes I had AIFF and AAC versions of many items

In my iTunes library, so I could easily distinguish between them, I’d use just the standard album title for the AAC version, and append AIFF to the album title in that format. Of course, iTunes dutifully created a folder in the artist’s folder with each version; one folder would be named After Awhile and the other would be After Awhile AIFF, for instance. At least in SVN 1586, Firefly seems to see the space and AIFF in the folder name as a file extension and (I assume because the object isn’t what Firefly expects to have that extension) not index it or its contents.

Once I’ve cleared out the AAC duplicates (and I am keeping backups), I’ll rename the folders and reindex, so it’ll work just fine. And I suspect maybe there are zero to, oh maybe two at the high end? people on Earth who’ll also do this particular sequence of events. But I figured I’d pass it along.

Hrm… that is strange. I’ll see if I can reproduct that.

— Ron

[Author]

Posts