Some guidance moving from single to dual (sync'd) environment

[aldredd]

After some tips - sure I'm on the right track, but can't get it to come together!

I currently use MB on a single machine, with a 'full' installation of MB. My music is saved in M:\music\

I now want to use MB on a second device, and keep the music files and library (inc playlists, play counts etc) synchronized.

My plan was to move to a portable edition of MB, and sync it, and the folder, with my new device (I use freefilesync for this)

These are the steps I've taken...

On machine 1
backup up the appdata and library folders from the full installation
Added the portable edition within M:\music\MusicBeePortable
Copied across the appdata & library folders to the portable sub-folders

On machine 2
Created a partition & folder M:\music\
sync'd M:\music to M:\music on the 2 machines

Opened MB portable on machine 2, picked the location of the library

However, although the music library loads, with all the tracks, they're not mapped correctly. MB is looking for them in M:\music\musicbee\a\... (which, on machine 1 is where the original library was saved for the full installation. I've remapping to M:\music\ but this doesn't seem to fix it - it now looks for the files in M:\music\musicbeePortable\a\...

So I know I've gone wrong somewhere - probably on step 1, but can't quite figure out what I should be doing differently!

Thanks for any help you can offer

[aldredd]

Gah, think I've got it.

When remapping, the default 'from' location was incorrect, which is why remapping had no effect. I changed the from field to where I knew it was trying to load the files from, then the remapping worked.

[phred]

Remember that MB isn't made to be used in multi-user environments.  Don't try to do any tagging on the second machine.  Also, I'm not sure playcounts will be combined between the two installs.   A search of the forums should yield some posts on what others have tried.

[aldredd]

Thanks phred,

Yeah, I realise I've 'butchered' it a bit - but it should be the case that I'm only using one environment at a time - so don't expect / need it to 'merge' playcounts - just update one with the other.
As for tagging, I use a 3rd party app to handle tagging, which I'll predominantly do on machine 1. Though, given I'll 2-way sync, would there continue to be a notion of 'machine 1 vs 2' - it's effectively a single portable install, but rather than moving the drive, I'm syncing it across the two devices, including the media itself.

I'll see how it goes though - it's by no means essential I sync the libraries - my setup is pretty basic with a few auto-playlists, and ratings written to file - so it's only really the playcount that I'm trying to get around - overkill perhaps