Author Topic: Syncing and 'modified date'  (Read 3285 times)

Anti

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When I sync playlists to my mp3 player, MB overwrites nearly all 12Gb of files even though I may actually only be adding or deleting two or three albums. It seems to do this because editing tags changes the 'date modified' field, and like many people I'm constantly editing my collection.

My proposal is to have a tick-box next to the 'synchronise' button, labelled something like: 'do not overwrite existing files'.
When ticked, MB will compare filenames only, and ignore tag and 'date modified' differences.
If a filename exists, MB will not overwrite that file with a new version.

Any thoughts or comments?

lnminente

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A thread from Gary titled "How do you backup your audio-files and keep tags in sync?": http://getmusicbee.com/forum/index.php?topic=9470.0
And my thoughts on giving an unique id to each song for improving the sync: http://getmusicbee.com/forum/index.php?topic=6100.0

Anti

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I guess two-way sync is something players like MB may have to think more about in the near future because of the proliferation of devices which will actually allow you to develop and edit part of your library on the device. Personally I'm still years away from buying a phone or tablet which has that capability.

For the foreseeable future I'll just be using a dumb, old-fashioned mp3 player - I send tracks to it, choose and an album or playlist and press play, so I'm only concerned with one-way sync. Yes, I know - so 'last decade'. You idea is a fully-fledged solution, whereas I just want a quick band-aid.

The two workflow options I seem to have are:

Maintain one sync playlist for the device, add a couple of new albums to it, hit 'sync' once a week, and wait for an hour while Gigabytes of files are overwritten.

OR

Maintain two playlists - one for an occasional 'proper' sync using the sync button, and another called 'new albums to manually move'. I'd put new albums on both lists, but once a week I would manually drag albums to the device from the second playlist, and then manually delete them from the playlist, hence avoiding a full sync.

Bleh!
Last Edit: October 31, 2013, 12:46:30 PM by Anti

lnminente

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One trick could be using an external program for changing modification dates conveniently on files on Pc and on external device. It could have undesired effects but could be better than overwriting lot of gigabytes.

Anti

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I've looked at those programs, and it's not really a good solution. Windows and back-up software don't like it either.
It's important that the modified date should stay intact.

It would just be great if MB could sync to a device whilst optionally ignoring the modified date and maybe other 'unimportant' tag changes.

porterdog

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With ever-larger memory cards available it would seem that this feature will become more and more important.   Plus 1 on the request, please!