Moving
Preliminary
These instructions are for moving your music files from your *internal* drive to an *external* drive. If you're moving from an external to a new external, just clone the external drive and that's it.
Also keep in mind that the below only applies to music you have ripped from your CD collection or purchased from the built-in stores. That is, it does not work for files you have "Add to library..."'d. In other words, if you have imported pre-existing MP3+G files, this procedure will not help you. In that case, use the "The Symbolic Link Trick" below
Just The Music
Advantage: All your actual music files are on an external volume, saving space on your internal drive. You can run kJams even if the volume is offline, creating playlists, setting pitches, creating / editing singers, edit meta info, or any other editing or management.
Disadvantage: You can't rip, play or burn, and your settings (songs & meta info, playists, singers etc) won't transfer automatically if you plug the external drive into another machine.
- In the location where you want to put your music (which may be on an external drive, or network folder), create a folder called "kJams"
- Now go to ~/Music/kJams/ (on your internal drive), inside that you'll find "kJams Music" folder
- Drag that folder to the newly created "kJams" folder from step 1. If this is on an external volume, it will be copied, so be sure to delete the original "kJams Music" folder after you make the copy.
- Run kJams. Once the application is running, go to preferences->advanced, and click the "Change..." button to set the library location to the new place (pick "kJams Music" from the kJams folder created in step 1).
Music Plus All Library Settings
Advantage: You can take your drive to a different machine and plug it in, and the kJams on THAT machine will now be up to date with all your playlists, singers, venues, rotation, songs and related meta info.
Disadvantage: You can not run kJams with the volume offline.
- In the Finder, go to ~/Music/kJams/
- Drag that entire folder (the one called "kJams") to your external volume. Delete the original afterwards.
- On the external volume, select the newly copied "kJams" folder and make an alias.
- Drag that alias into your ~/Music/ folder, make sure you rename the alias so it just says "kJams", not "kJams alias"
- you can now delete the alias from the other volume, you don't need it any more
- Now, on all the machines you plan to use this library with, plug in the drive then launch kJams. Go to preferences->advanced, and click the "Change..." button to set the library location to the new place (pick "kJams Music" from inside the "kJams" folder, from where you placed it in step 2)
Cloning a setup
Advantage: You maintain a fullly working ready-to-run backup of your entire setup
Disadvantage: You must manually maintain sync between the two systems.
To see the instructions see Cloning.
Serving Music Remotely
You can serve your music from one computer to another. Using either of the above methods, you can mount your music volume from your network before you launch kJams. If you store your music on a FAT32 or DOS volume (which is reasonable if you share your karaoke library with a Windows computer), you will need to share your music with SharePoints using SMB, and mount the volume using smb:// in the connect dialog in the finder.
The Symbolic Link Trick
This may not work on Windows, not tested yet, anyone care to try and let me know?
- Quit kJams
- download and install PathFinder or SymbolicLinker
- drag and drop the root folder from the source location to the dest location
- delete the folder from the source location
- using PathFinder (File Menu->Alias->Make Symbolic Link) or SymbolicLinker (right click on file->Make Symbolic Link), make a Symbolic Link of the folder at the dest location
- drag it to the source location, so it *seems* that the files appear to be in the source location, at the same path
- if the symlink is still there next to the dest location folder, you can delete it
- run kJams, open your "Activity" window, wait for any tasks to finish
- do a Forced Save (⌘⇧⌥⌃-S) -- this will update all the paths in the DB to the new location
- delete the symbolic lik