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Re:Consolidate [Why copying is bad]
Authored by: unxmaal on Jan 27, '03 04:49:25PM

A sane person could consolidate, yes. However, an insane person, who has over 15,000 mp3s [entire CD collection backed up to HD] that existed on a remote server, cannot feasibly "consolidate".

The main reason is that iTune's 'consolidate' simply copies files from the remote server to the local machine, across the network. This is bad, because there is a chance for the data to become corrupted during the transfer, especially during a large, long transfer across a live network.

The only reliable way to copy data across the network [in any situation] is by using an program that will verify the data integrity [by use of checksum or crc or whatever]. In my case, I used rsync, but you could use tar or cpio or maybe ditto.

Now that the files exist on my local machine, I could "consolidate". However, consolidate assumes that the ID3 tags are correct, and relocates the files to a directory structure based on the ID3 tag information. As I do enjoy doing other things besides fixing my ID3 tags, I have about 2000 mp3s that do not even have tags, which would result in 2000 songs being dumped into an 'unknown artist' folder.



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