Since MM uses drive VOLUME ID to track files regardless of their drive letter, your goal is to remove the duplicate files with no classification info and move the files to your network node.

jk wrote:Do you agree that I should aim to end up with all files using the type URL??

Answering this myself here for anyone else following on . . . it seems that NETWORK is the appropriate one to select, which is type 42 in my database.

jk

Anyone able to explain where the Tempo, Mood, Occassion and Quality is stored?? I can't see it in Songs . . . but I can see the various possibilities in the 'Lists' table . . . but the 'Lists' table isn't included in the Tools>Relationships page . . .

Thanks,

JK

Great! Thanks for explaining all of that 'Teknojnky'.
I can see what you mean . . . there are four drive numbers 'IDMEDIA' being used . . . I have some tidying up to do!! I'll wait till I can sit still for long enough to do it thoroughly

Do you agree that I should aim to end up with all files using the type URL?? (the other types are NETWORK and DATA-DISK (the name of the HDD partition)).

And I will make plenty of backups.

Thanks again.

jk

If you open the classifications nodes and select a file you can go the properties to see which location it references. That will likely be the location you want to move your files FROM.

Since MM uses drive VOLUME ID to track files regardless of their drive letter, your goal is to remove the duplicate files with no classification info and move the files to your network node.

As always, make sure you made a backup copy of your medimonkey.mbd in your my music\mediamonkey folder. Once you have *confirmed* which location node does *not* have the classification node info, you can remove that location from the library entirely (right click > remove > delete from library ONLY). This should clean out most/all of the duplicate entries.

Now for the tricky part.

I don't know how exactly MM stores network volume ID's, but what you want to do is some how change the volume id (in your database) of your local drive to be the volume id for the network share for each of the tracks. This can be done using search and replace on the applicable field(s).

The tables you want to look at is the 'media' tables, and the 'songs' table.

The related field is the "IDMedia" field.

If you see the correct network location in your media table, note what the IDMedia is, then on the 'songs' table, search and replace the IDMedia field with whatever the id is for the network location.

Again, I must emphasize to create a backup of your mediamonkey.mdb file before opening or making any changes to it with any access or other program.

Perhaps an explanation of the drive changes is in order? Although I am refering to network terms the work thus far has all been done on the one 'server' computer . . . I was simply preparing to introduce two other networked computer to share the music and database . . .

I started with the music all in folders on the local drive partition D:, in a root folder called Music, ie D:\Music, and moved the database to a subfolder following the FAQ article, setting the ini file to match.

Realising that my notebook could not have a D drive mapped to the music, etc, I decided to standardise on the letter M: = D:\Music and shared that folder as 'Music'.
Even the local computer can map to itself so this was done and all further ripping etc was sent to the 'local' drive M:

Further advice showed that MediaMonkey does not work well with mapped drives and needs UNC names so I changed to using \\servername\music as the source location . . .

Then I found that under some nodes I had up to three copies of the same tracks (at each of the above 'locations')!! Some time later I found that the data on the 'Classification' page was only ever present on one instance . . .

My need now is to stop and glean some advice from others who are using networking in the hope that I can find a way through the maze that can be relied on. If developers are reading I sincerely hope that the notes provided here help them track down the bugs and at least create some warnings when their software detects any of these troublesome steps being ventured into!

If my data can be copied easily from old backups that would be great - any tips please! But I mostly need to have my confidence restored that MM can be relied upon if I don't stray outside of it's boundaries. Surely I am not the only user trying to setup their music data in a safe central place; with the beautiful chance to tag it all using the Tempo/Mood/Occassion/Custom fields . . . and read it from a remote computer driving the stereo in the lounge room?

Anyone care to comment?

Cheers all,

jk

Tempo, Mood, and Occassion problems with FLAC data.

Thanks to those who have helped thus far. I am starting this thread with this more accurate title - perhaps someone knows the answer?

I have managed to confuse the database by either changing from the local drive to the UNC drive and then to a mapped drive (or perhaps just by adjusting the folder names?). End result is that my carefully crafted values for Tempo, Mood, and Occassion (and Quality) have vanished from the current version of the mediamonkey.mdb database.

Although I would love some insight into what I have done to upset the applecart; my main concern is to get the data back from a backup of the mdb file. Can someone please tell me the steps? I have opened the file in Access 2003 but am not sure which table and field holds the data nor how to copy same to the latest file . . . I can get help from a friend who is proficient in Access if necessary . . . but some pointers for her would be appreciated too.

Many thanks,

jk