Media Consolidation & Your Sanity!
When you’re consolidating media to one device, transferring lots of files can be a time consuming process and there is a possibility of loosing your valuable files and information about the files. Just as importantly, if you plan your consolidation badly, you end up running out of space and spending a lot of time deleting unnecessary files and copies later.
The truth is that with the fast networks and a friendly server like the Linksys by Cisco Media Hub, it’s not difficult to share and move files around your home network. Many people want to use their familiar iTunes, photography or other software, so a little knowledge can help. A useful mnemonic is SPORE:
Speed
Plan
Organize
Redundancy
Export
Speed
The first issue is speed. For most people, an 802.11g or G wireless network is fine for just about everything. That is until you start to deal with video or large volumes of files. The first time you see that transferring a 100 gigabyte on a 802.11g network is going to take you 50 hours or so, you’ll quickly realize you are better off using an Ethernet cable for a one time transfer, or even better, upgrading permanently to the next generation of wireless routers, the Dual N routers so that you can handle video streaming.
Plan
While video is big, music is complicated. It can take time to upload video when files can run between 1 and 8 gig. But a music collection is messy and has lots of small files in the 5-15 megabyte range that in aggregate add up. You have a lot of files and you have lots of information about it – ratings, playlists, comments, etc. If you don’t have very many music files, digital videos or photos, planning is not very important. But if you are an avid collector, hard drive consumption is always an issue. You can quickly eat up your hard drive by having too many unnecessary copies of music and using RAID features to increase the security of your server (i.e. you are storing two independent copies on a pair of hard drives in Media Hub, so if one dies, you still have a copy.)
Most people are using iTunes for managing their music, so you need to make an important decision about how you use iTunes. iTunes offers the option of “consolidating” your library. It sounds pretty scary. You wonder if your files will get changed in any way. Will they get converted to some Apple format and prevent you from using them. Will the original file be deleted? Will you lose access to copy protected files? Our suggestion is that you should allow iTunes to consolidate your files: it makes moving music files and other information (ratings, playlists, and comments) that you have entered easier. Files remain the same. They just get copied to a folder in iTunes. And you can control whether files get converted to formats Apple supports.
Organize
So with a little effort, the owner of a large music collection can simplify his/her life. But it does take a little time. Say you have a 10,000 song collection and currently you have not allowed your iTunes to consolidate your library. You have alternative ways of tackling the problem:
1. If you have not consolidated your iTunes library, nor rated your music and have few custom playlists, then you can just let the Media Hub import everything. Any clean-up can be done later when you redirect iTunes to look for music on the Media Hub.
2. If you have lots of playlists and ratings, you have put comments into iTunes database fields and it would be a lot of work to reconstruct your meta-data (information about the music), then it would be a good idea to:
a. Back up your playlists
b. Consolidate your library (bear in mind that this may take quite a long time, perhaps 24 hours)
c. Import the consolidated iTunes directory to the Media Hub
d. Redirect iTunes to the files that have now been moved to the Media Hub
e. Alternatively you can set up a separate library in iTunes for the Library on the Media Hub and the source library. We will address multiple libraries in later blogs, but the key piece of knowledge is that if you hold down the Shift key in Windows or Option key on the Mac before you fire up iTunes, you can create a new library. Make sure you have redirected iTunes to the new directory where you want the new library to be located before restarting iTunes and holding down the Shift or Option key.
3. If you have a rather disorganized life and you know you have semi-overlapping directories on different machines, then a huge time saver is to attempt to sync the two source directories before you import onto the Media Hub. A low cost product like GoodSync is huge time saver for someone with over 10,000 files sitting in several directories, if some files are on both directories and other files are only in one of the directories.
Once you have synced the directories, you only need to monitor and/or import one of them to the Media Hub. Once you have a clean directory, then you can consolidate your library into iTunes. Then you would upload the iTunes directory to the Media Hub. What’s the benefit of all this? Let’s say that you had 8,000 files sitting in one source directory and 8,000 files in a second directory and had 50% overlap. If you had not cleaned up your directories, you would have to sort and review 16,000 files on your Media Hub and then delete 4,000 files manually. That is a pain you can save yourself or about $20 or $30 with syncing software.
Redundancy
If you have followed the strategies in the Organize section, there is a side benefit, you now have created redundancy. You potentially have redundancy in the following ways:
1. If you have synchronized two folders to make sure you have all your music captured, then you have also made a backup.
2. If you have consolidated one of your source directories into the iTunes library you have created a backup.
3. If you have uploaded your iTunes directory to your Media Hub you have a backup.
4. And of course, you have the option of creating a backup of your Media Hub to a new location.
5. You can also create additional redundancy by
a. Using RAID where files are actually written to two different hard drives so if one goes down, you still have a copy.
b. Use the same synchronization software to manually synchronize every time you buy music or on a regular schedule.
Understanding how much redundancy you have allows you to intelligently decide which copies of your content you can afford to delete.
Export
Most people find that when they are moving files around, they sometimes tend to lose playlists and ratings. So, it is a good idea for insurance to manually export a copy of your library and your playlists in iTunes. Right mouse click the playlist and Export it as an XML file.
So there you have it! S-P-O-R-E
Please let us know if you have any questions about consolidating media on your home network. You can reach us on the comment section of this blog, Twitter or Facebook.
If you’d like to learn more about the connected life Cisco can provide, please visit the Cisco consumer site and the Linksys by Cisco website.
Posted by Johanna Fry at 11:43AM PST
Johanna Fry
Cisco Around the Web