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@jowie wrote:
No that’s okay – I could do that, but only if it’s possible to set up Firefly to arrange its folders in the same way iTunes does. If it doesn’t then it’s probably no good. 🙁
Well…Firefly can read an iTunes xml database directly to load his meta-data. So I think letting iTunes arrange the folders and just telling Firefly where they are would work fine.
@jowie wrote:
iTunes aside, what do all you Firefly users use to manage your music libraries?
Being more of a Windoze/Linux person, I run Firefly on an unslung NSLU2 that that has two USB disks attached. Firefly’s primary purpose in my setup is to stream to two Roku SoundBridges that I have in the house. The music library as available as a Samba share to Windows clients. I use several apps for working with my music files….dbPoweramp for ripping and encoding. MP3Tag for tagging, and Winamp for organizing, sometimes playing, and iPod synching. I could do all of this with Winamp, but the other apps are a bit more robust for those tasks.
@jtbse wrote:
Well…Firefly can read an iTunes xml database directly to load his meta-data. So I think letting iTunes arrange the folders and just telling Firefly where they are would work fine.
That’s good. 🙂
My problem really is this: I tend to just potter about the house, listening to iTunes streamed from my server machine (G4 upstairs) to the hifi downstairs. If a tune comes up and I want to add some metadata to it (eg add an album name or tag it with some words) or just rearrange it in some way, I remote-desktop into the machine and mess with the data in iTunes. Ideally it would be nice to be able to connect to a music server just by using iTunes alone and be able to manipulate that library as if it belonged to the client machine.
What I’m really looking for is “Vaporware” in a way 😉 I want “iTunes Server”, the ability to launch iTunes, connect to a shared library using an admin username and password and then to have complete control over that library.
Still, that’s not to say that Firefly may be a slight improvement on what I have at the moment in terms of pointlessly large amounts of processor power. 😉 I know I have been able to get iTunes to point to its own library over a network, it just unnerves me that’s all. The library file it relies on is ridiculously big (in my case about 20MB), and I’d be too worried about having a power outage or losing network connection and screwing up my lovely library. With all the best backups in place, this is still a rather daunting issue to have to sort out.
@jowie wrote:
Ideally it would be nice to be able to connect to a music server just by using iTunes alone and be able to manipulate that library as if it belonged to the client machine.
I agree. But sadly, the iTunes daap protocol is read-only. From a remote daap share, you can’t tag or create playlists, etc. It’s what I want as well, but probably won’t have any luck while we don’t have iTunes source.
What I do to manage my library with iTunes and still share it for devices that I might listen to when my laptop lid is closed (roku soundbridge, etc), is to manage my master library from iTunes on my laptop and synchronize it to my server. That way it acts as both my backup and my centralized music server. I use rsync for that, but one could as easily use Unison on a windows machine, or whatever else works.
It’s not ideal, but it does take care of three of my problems — disconnected music sharing, centralized music management, and backups of a collection of ripped & tagged music that represents too much effort to lose.
I know I have been able to get iTunes to point to its own library over a network, it just unnerves me that’s all.
Yeah, I’ve done that in a pinch before too, but I don’t care to either.
— Ron
@rpedde wrote:
What I do to manage my library with iTunes and still share it for devices that I might listen to when my laptop lid is closed (roku soundbridge, etc), is to manage my master library from iTunes on my laptop and synchronize it to my server. That way it acts as both my backup and my centralized music server. I use rsync for that, but one could as easily use Unison on a windows machine, or whatever else works.
Interesting… So you’re saying you actually do all your management and editing in iTunes, and then rsync deals with copying it to the main Firefly server… Sounds like a nice idea!
Is rsync clever enough to just backup the changes rather than just create an entire new copy?
@jowie wrote:
Is rsync clever enough to just backup the changes rather than just create an entire new copy?
Yes. It only copies changed stuff. Aside from the initial sync (which ran overnight), the syncs after that only take a couple minutes.
Excellent… Looks like that would work well. 🙂
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