Re: [Banshee-List] Sharing Metadata across several computers

[Roderich Schupp <roderich schupp googlemail com>]

On Mon, Jun 6, 2011 at 9:19 AM, Uaebuntu <jcrmassey eim ae> wrote:
> I have a large (114GB) music collection, collected over the years and stored
> on NAS.
> ...
> Is there a way to sync (and merge) the metadata from each of the machines so
> I'm not rewriting it on every machine, depending on the size of the files

Banshee keeps its view of the metadata (tarck info, scoring etc) in an Sqlite
database. It's initially filled when importing your music collection into
Banshee from the NAS. By default this Sqlite database is located below
your home directory, but you can change it via a command line option.

In theory, you could place the database also on the NAS (modulo the
usual warning that the network file system must properly support
fcntl() locking). No need to synchronize anything.

I'm not sure however, if Banshee is able to cope with this - even on the
same machine it won't allow multiple instances of itself. Perhaps
it can't cope with database changes from another instance.

However you could still synchronize per client Sqlite database instances
to and from a master copy on the NAS by simple copy or
using rsync (the database consists of a single file in a portable format).

If this doesn't work you could use the option "write metadata to files".
Then some (all?) metadata changes will be written to ID3 tags
into the actual music tracks on the NAS (in addition to be being commited
to the Sqlite database). If you then re-import the NAS collection into
Banshee running on another machine it should just pick up the
changes. This periodic rescan might take a long time though.


Cheers, Roderich