Avoid duplicates when copying music from another PC
Jul 27, '07 07:30:02AM • Contributed by: tom larkin
Jul 27, '07 07:30:02AM • Contributed by: tom larkin
I am sure some of you have had this issue before if you use more than one platform at home. Personally for me, OS X and iTunes lack some audio features I like so I don't do my audio ripping from my personal CD collection on a Mac. I do it on my windows/Linux box so I can take advantage of some good open source formats like OGG, FLAC, and MP3vbr (though I think the newest release of itunes will support VBR? not sure). [Editor: iTunes has had VBR support for quite a while.] However, I like to have my music collection on my Mac so I can listen to my music when I am working on it, and my laptop is a Macbook Pro.
I am sure a lot of you already know this, and this is nothing new or exciting, but I have used basic Unix commands to copy my music directory from my PC to my Mac using rsync, and have not had it copy over any duplicate albums. For example, I have about 40GB of music ripped to my PC of my own personal collection. When I copy it via SMB over the network, it duplicates about every five albums or so which is annoying. To get around this I simply used rsync instead. Make sure all the proper permissions are in place, so you can mount your share from Windows or Linux box on your mac. Connect to the share and mount it. Once it's mounted, use this very simple command:
Also since you can simply drag and drop the file paths directly into Terminal, it makes it even easier. If you were so inclined, you could make a shell script doing this with a cron job so it auto-updates once a week or whatever. This method could be applied from Mac to Mac as well, but if your Macs are networked, you could just share it over AirTunes or what not.
I am sure a lot of you already know this, and this is nothing new or exciting, but I have used basic Unix commands to copy my music directory from my PC to my Mac using rsync, and have not had it copy over any duplicate albums. For example, I have about 40GB of music ripped to my PC of my own personal collection. When I copy it via SMB over the network, it duplicates about every five albums or so which is annoying. To get around this I simply used rsync instead. Make sure all the proper permissions are in place, so you can mount your share from Windows or Linux box on your mac. Connect to the share and mount it. Once it's mounted, use this very simple command:
rsync -r -u /path/to/your/music /destination/on/your/mac
You can use this over and over again -- the -u tag should only copy new material from your other computer and not copy what has already been copied. I have been using this method for about a month now, since I rip everything in FLAC then convert it to MP3 and then copy it to my Mac via Terminal. So far no more duplicate albums are being copied using this method.
Also since you can simply drag and drop the file paths directly into Terminal, it makes it even easier. If you were so inclined, you could make a shell script doing this with a cron job so it auto-updates once a week or whatever. This method could be applied from Mac to Mac as well, but if your Macs are networked, you could just share it over AirTunes or what not.
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