Author Topic: how do i disable "ghost" files with portable setup  (Read 2642 times)

sdziscool

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well hello there, dear reader, i have a question about Musicbee and the functioning of dead links

i'll start with explaining the current situation: i have a laptop with a limited amount of space (about 200GB total, FYI) and a few days ago, i reached the limit, so to say. my music library covers about 75% of all data and i don't really have any space left for it. that being said, i do have an external hard-drive i always connect to when at home (sort of a desktop set-up) and I've decided to fill the external hard drive with the music that's going to be added in the future. of course I'll only be able to listen to the tracks at home and not on the way, but i don't really mind. what i do mind however is that, when I'm not connected, the player will try to play one of the files indexed by Musicbee, find out the HDD isn't connected, and report said track as "missing"/a dead link. and I'd have to rescan every-time i come home.
is there any (simple) way to index the files, but disable them, so they won't be played until i reconnect, or do i have to blacklist them from my standard autoplaylists and create seperate autoplaylists for when i'm at home and when i'm on the go?

i hope this was understandable, if not, please tell me what was unclear and i'll try to reword it/use correct grammar

thanks in advance!

Pingaware

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The solution I would use (quite a personal one, but it works well) is to create a second library on your portable hard drive. In this library, I would have all the tracks from your portable hard drive and your main laptop hard drive. You could then create auto-playlists for both libraries without fear of dead links. This has the nice advantage that, if for whatever reason you forget to switch libraries to the laptop only one before you're going to have a music session where you won't have the portable disk attached, dead links won't ever show and there shouldn't be any nasty side effects - MB will just say it can't locate your library and make you select the other one.

The one disadvantage to this approach (that I can think of off the top of my head) is that play counts between the two libraries will differ. But you may not consider this a problem at all.
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