Moving music collection

[steviebb]

Hi,

I want to back up my music collection to my new laptop. It is currently stored on a portable Hard Drive.
Is there an easy way? All tracks etc are in their own folder on the HD so I can replicate everything on the laptop except the drive letter. Is there a simple way of altering all the drive locations on the database?

Hope you can help.

[BLOWERS]

Yes! I do this too - keep all my music on an external HD. Take a note of the drive letter your external HD is (always the same, presumably) on your main PC. If it is always drive "F" (for example), you can make it always "F" on your laptop, and that should solve your problem. I use XP Home - it may be a slightly different procedure in Vista, but just look for help in assigning a letter to a drive. The way I do it is:

1. Plug your external HD in to your laptop.
2. Right click on 'My Computer'- select 'Manage'.
3. Open the Storage > Disk management window.
4. Your external drive should be listed in the right-hand window - right click where you see it (let's say it's down as drive "G").
5. Select "Change drive letter and paths". When the window comes up, change the drive to "F" (if that is what the HD always is on your main PC), follow the instructions, and it will ALWAYS then show as Drive "F" on your laptop.

Basically, just make sure the external HD will always have the same drive letter regardless of which computer it is plugged into. One more thing to remember, though. If you have altered your templates in any way that requires OCD to look for other files, make sure OCD is looking for the right drive letter! I have to remember that my laptop's main drive is "E", and not "C". Using daxedit (a programme that you'll find in the OCD main directory), I open my template and, under each different tab, I run a 'search and replace'. I look for C: and replace all instances with E:. That way, any icons I have set will appear on my laptop OCD installation. This bit might not affect you - it's just that I have custom icons that appear next to tracks to identify things like 'favourite', 'guitar solo' etc etc!

Hope this helps...

[BLOWERS]

Oh - one MORE thing! The instructions I just offered were made on the assumption that you were wanting to play music files stored in folders on your external HD via the OCD interface. The other thing you might want to do is make sure that your CD/DVD drive on your laptop has the same drive letter as the one you use on your main PC. Just follow the same procedure as I outlined before - it should be straightforward!

[steviebb]

Hi,
Thanks for the answer but it not quite what I meant.

I want to move all my music to my hard drive on my lap. How do I re-direct the OCD to play the files from there new destination.

[BLOWERS]

You would have to ensure that the drive letter of your laptop's hard drive is the same as the drive letter of the external hard drive you originally set things up on. I'm sure you can do this, but you'd need to check exactly how. It might be as simple as the way I described earlier, or you might need to do it through the BIOS settings on your laptop.

The principle is the same - OCD will be looking for the drive letter to be the same if it is to play stuff!

[andrei_c]

I want to back up my music collection to my new laptop. It is currently stored on a portable Hard Drive.
Is there an easy way? All tracks etc are in their own folder on the HD so I can replicate everything on the laptop except the drive letter. Is there a simple way of altering all the drive locations on the database?

Yes, you can repoint your database entries to use files on different drive or in different folder. Here's how to do it.

1. menu Navigate -> Entire collection
2. press Ctrl+A to select all albums
3. right click and select Rescan.
4. select second option, titled "Just update the file names, sizes, times and bitrates". (Important! You don't want to do full rescan as it will be much longer and will overwrite your data in the database!)
5. Press Scan.

When OrangeCD reaches first album that was moved, it will prompt you for a new location. It will use first song of the album as reference. Provide the new location of the first song.

The rest will happen automatically. OrangeCD will continue rescanning remaining albums and it will deduct where they are located based on common sense and your previous input. If there's any album that cannot be found, it will ask you again - but normally it will only happen once.

Let me know if for some reason it didn't work as I described.