Running MediaMonkey on My File Server

[counterpaul]

I'm trying to decide whether MediaMonkey is the right music manager for me and I have some questions. I've searched quite a bit but I haven't managed to find quite the information I'm looking for.

Here's my situation:

- I'm running an old Mac Pro as a file server. This is where all my media lives. I'm totally comfortable running MM in a Windows VM on this machine.
- My primary machine is a PC that I'd rather not use as the MM server for the house.
- I need to be able to access my music library on a Roku and a few other computers on the local network.
- I need to be able to sync my iPhone with MM.
- I need my iPhone, my Roku, and any other devices I use to play music to update playcounts in the database.

What I really want is to use a VM on the Mac Pro as a MediaMonkey server but do all my media management (adding music, tagging, adding/editing playlists, syncing my iPhone) on my main PC. I also want to be able to access my music for playback on any device in the house whether my main PC is on or not. The server will be on 24/7.

Is this something MediaMonkey can handle reliably?

It seems like a fairly straightforward request, but every thread I found that referred to similar situations seemed to either die out without much in the way of responses or go off on some other semi-related subject (usually regarding the cloud).

What I've read so far about sharing a single MM database between multiple computers has implied that it's possible but not totally stable. However, I wonder if the situation I'm proposing might be slightly different--I'm not looking to share a database so that several computers can manage the library at once.

Instead, I want two machines to directly access the database: the server would only need to run the media sharing service and the main PC would do the rest of the management. All the other clients on the network would merely be playing tracks and updating play counts via UPnP/DLNA.

Given this scenario, could I reliably share the location of the database between the server and the main PC and let both machines access it simultaneously?

I can absolutely mirror all the drive letters on both Windows machines, so file path conflicts shouldn't be an issue. The only question, unless I'm missing something, is whether the database can handle all the read/write requests.

I like MediaMonkey a lot and I hope I can get it working for me. It seems like my needs are fairly modest, but I certainly don't want to deal with lots of crashes or database corruption.

I appreciate your thoughts.

[Lowlander]

Not really, but...

(don't know which features if any don't function on MAC in VM)

DLNA can take care of streaming media from MediaMonkey to the various DLNA capable device around the same network (home). However DLNA won't allow for editing of files (edit tags, move/rename, delete). You'd also need to sync from the MAC PC itself.

You could share the MediaMonkey database itself over the network. However the database (SQLite) wasn't designed for simultaneous access and thus may not always work as desired (especially when adding VM in the mix). If you do share the database you'd be able to edit and sync media from the other PC while the server would run DLNA duties.

http://www.mediamonkey.com/support/inde ... s--devices

[counterpaul]

Thanks for the response.

I read through the link you included and, forgive me if I'm missing something obvious, I didn't see a description of how to edit and sync media from one PC and allow another to run DNLA duties.

This is exactly what I want to do. Is there a tutorial somewhere describing that workflow, or could you walk me through it?

So far, I have successfully managed to get MediaMonkey on both PCs (my main computer and the virtual machine) to access and use exactly the same database. That part wasn't too hard (I just mapped all the shared drives the same way on both systems, copied my MM.DB file to a folder both computers could access, and edited each machine's MediaMonkey.ini file to point to the shared MM.DB).

If all I wanted to do was use one machine at a time to play and manage all my music, this setup would work beautifully. I experienced no issues with accessing the database over a network.

Anyway, predictably, problems arose when I tried to run MediaMonkey on both machines simultaneously. What happens is that one machine or the other is forced into read-only mode. Whichever instance is launched first gets to make changes, while the second can only view and will end up throwing a bunch of errors since most of what you do in MediaMonkey will try to write to the database in some way. This behavior is smart as I'm sure it prevents database corruption but unfortunately it makes my proposed usage scenario impossible.

I would love to hear about a way to run the DLNA process on my server machine while simultaneously being able to manage the music library on my main PC. DLNA is really all I need the server for.

In fact, if there is a third-party DLNA server application that can directly access a MediaMonkey database and update play counts without MediaMonkey having to run at all, that might be ideal.

Thanks!

[Lowlander]

I would love to hear about a way to run the DLNA process on my server machine while simultaneously being able to manage the music library on my main PC. DLNA is really all I need the server for.

Only with the shared database (unless you use separate databases and have each updated each time the other makes changes).

[counterpaul]

Only with the shared database (unless you use separate databases and have each updated each time the other makes changes).

So, how would that work? I have the database in a shared location and I can run MediaMonkey on both machines, but the problem is running them simultaneously.

Earlier you said, "If you do share the database you'd be able to edit and sync media from the other PC while the server would run DLNA duties."

That sounds great, but are there step-by-step instructions somewhere that would help me accomplish that? Is there a specific process I'd need to run on the server that would handle only DLNA and allow me to use MMW on my main PC?

Or would I need to remote desktop into the VM and stop the MediaMonkey process every time I wanted to run MMW on my main PC? That would be a pretty massive pain in the neck.

What I'm looking for is some way to use one machine as a DLNA server while simultaneously using MMW on another machine, both referring to the same database. Is that possible?

Thank you for the help.

[Lowlander]

What I'm looking for is some way to use one machine as a DLNA server while simultaneously using MMW on another machine, both referring to the same database. Is that possible?

Yes, but maybe not. As I said a shared database is what's needed to do what you want (seamlessly), but as it's SQLite based it isn't designed for simultaneous access.