Monday, November 22, 2010

Media Rover Potential iTunes Library Syncing Awesomeness

Thanks to a post on Gizmodo I found out about Media Rover which is a free program that syncs iTunes libraries from mulitple computers with each other via a network shared drive. I won't go in depth into setup information here, you can find plenty of articles on the Media Rover Blog and help on their site.

So now that I've got the Synology Disk Station 211J setup at home, the first thing I did was setup a shared drive so that I could use Media Rover (Synology Disk Station 211J Setup Part 2 with info on shared drive setup). First I set it up on my PC, I simply followed the instructions as linked above and everything was cool. I had a couple of errors when syncing but most of them were for video files and the remaining few where corrupt music files (that I can hopefully recover from the old laptop).

The next step was to install it on my ancient iBook (circa 2002) and see how it went... not so brilliant is probably a good summation. It doesn't have OS X 10.5 (in fact I am not even sure that it'll run Leopard, which is a moot point because I don't even own it!), so it is going to stay stuck on Tiger. Anyway, as I am really considering what to do with it (at the very least a clean install) I decided I might as well copy all my music off it anyway. It was about halfway through this process that I realized I'd probably already done it in the past. So I cancelled the transfer and sure enough everything had already been copied across. Looks like there won't be any syncing to the iBook.

However, perhaps I was trying a little to hard to get that going anyway, after all I don't really use the laptop that much anyway, I am probably better off getting rid of iTunes on it and just using a simple program to play them off the shared drive on the NAS anyway.

Onwards to my fiancées oldish windows laptop, which is absolutely running like a dog at the moment. It is definitely in need of a clean up and reinstall. There is however some music on there that hasn't been synced with the main library, so I decided I would try and get it going and get all the tunes off it.

What an abysmal failure that was!

After spending an hour getting it fired up and Media Rover installed the iTunes install turned out to be corrupted. So I've reverted to getting the last of the songs off manually, some of the files are corrupted apparently, and I am now getting it ready to be wiped, hopefully I can get that done this weekend. Its going to take a while to transfer stuff off though because the LAN port doesn't want to work properly so I've got to use wireless.

On to the final computer, the Power Book, the main reason for wanting to get Media Rover setup. The installation again was quite simple but when I went to run the first synchronisation it is telling me that it
Could not determine the iTunes version.
Bugger! Closing everything and then reopening Media Rover then presented my with another problem.
Failed - could not mount server
Double Bugger! So I reran the wizard to see that that would do. It connected successfully and synced the song that I had in the local iTunes but then when I changed the settings to download all the songs from the NAS and then the Powerbook died, the dreaded grey screen of death.

After rebooting I again fired up Media Rover and again it failed to connect to the server. I suspect that it doesn't like using numerical addresses for Samba shares as it was picking up the share on my desktop fine but would not detect the NAS. I ran the wizard again and managed to get it to copy all of the songs across to the laptop and get every synchronised.

However I am not comfortable with the stability of Media Rover on Mac to have it running continuously.  Or at this stage to use it regularly on the Mac. Thankfully I don't really shift music around or get new music that often so it should be alright. I'll keep an eye out for updates and see if I can provide some useful information to the Media Rover team.

Overall, I think the software has great potential, however it does need some work at least on the Mac side of things.

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