How Can I Backup My Editor's Library

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Sox
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How Can I Backup My Editor's Library

Post by Sox » Sat Sep 22, 2012 11:30 pm

This is an intended feature of my PMExplorer application, but until then you will have to backup your library manually.....

If you are upgrading to a new computer, you might want to transfer your whole music library from one PC to another. Or you may just wish to backup your library in case anything happens to your own.

I only have Windows Vista at home, so I cannot give advice on Mac, Windows XP or Windpws 7 or 8. If anyone else has any additional input on this OS's, post it here and I'll update this first thread.


Backing Up Your Library
The data for your music library is stored in a single SQLLite database called music.db. This database file is held in a "Tonium/Pacemaker" folder stored under your user "Roaming" folder. For my Vista PC and my username of Sox the full path to this folder is
C:\Users\Sox\AppData\Roaming\Tonium\Pacemaker

Now I think the user AppData folder is normally hidden so you may have to turn on the showing of hidden files and folder before you will see it.
In Windows Explorer:
  • Find your user folder where your documents & settings are stored (for me on Vista this is "C:\Users\Sox"). I think on XP it would have been "C:\Documents & Settings\Sox".
  • Open the tools menu (Alt-T)
  • Select "Folder Options"
  • Click the "View" tabbed page
  • Enable the "Show hidden files and folders" option
  • Press Ok
You should now be able to see an "AppData folder, and on Vista under this is a "Roaming". You should then be able to find "Tonium" and then "Pacemaker" inwhich you should find the music.db database file.

You can make a simple copy & paste copy of this database if you wish. However all the beat analysis data is stored in multiple files in "str" and "PeakCache" subfolders. If you don't want to risk losing this beat data and want to make a full backup, then I recommend you just zip up all of the Pacemaker folder and all o it's subfolders. The "Logs" subfolder isn't required and you can either exclude this from your backup, or delete the files from your backup once it has finished (or even delete the originals before you do the backup).

That's it you now have a backup of your library. To restore either unzip the backup to the original location (set to overwrite) or if you only copied the database, delete the one that's there, copy & paste your backup, then rename it back to Music.db

I have made a start on a Pacemaker utility application (Windows only) which will automate this for you. I'll update this post when it is available.
Watch this space.

Advice On Transferring Your Library to another PC
If you want to move your library from one PC to another I would:
  • Backup your whole roaming Tonium\Pacemaker library folder and all sub-folder as documented above[/il]
  • Install the Editor (always latest version for me) on the new PC
  • Locate the roaming Tonium\Pacemaker library folder on your new PC (it may be different if you upgrade to a new OS)
  • Unzip (or copy) you backup over the newly installed library database on your new PC.
However you need to be aware of this
Not only will you want to copy over all your music tracks, but you need to have them in exactly the same folder as they were on your original PC. This is because your music database stores the path of where the music file is/was located on your PC when you imported the track. If it is not the same then the editor will not be able to find the track when it comes to playing in a mix or transferring to your Pacemaker.

I fully suspect that if you have your tracks in "My Music" on Windows XP, and then copy them into "My Music" on Windows 7, that the underlying path to "My Music" will not be the same and you will have problems. To get it to work you would have to create the exact same folder structure that the files were originally under.
Eg. On Vista I think this would have been "C:\Users\Sox\Music"

I have added a track checking feature to my utility application, and I will be adding a "fix" feature to find the relocated tracks and update your database accordingly.
Watch this space.


Advice On Editing Your Track Info
Some people spend an age update the track info using the Pacemaker editor. I say if you are going to spend the time doing this then, assuming you are using mp3 tracks, do it outside of the editor and re-add the track to the editor. This way it is your music that has the correct info, and this will be used by any and all music applications that can access your tracks. Do it within the editor and only the editor has the updated information (because the editor doe snot update the mp3 tag info). If for some reason you uninstalled and reinstalled the Pacemaker editor, you will have lost all your updates. Do it my way, and you will be able to import that same tracks which already contain your updated info.

You can edit the info in your mp3 files using any number of mp3 tag editors, or you can do it using windows explorer.

Whenever I have new music tracks to add I always use Windows explorer to ensure my tag info is as I want (track title, artist, genre), and then I add it to the editor library.
Never experiment with drugs.... you might waste them

musicinstinct

Re: How Can I Backup My Editor's Library

Post by musicinstinct » Fri Aug 23, 2013 4:46 pm

In case anyone on Mac was wondering, in OSX the music database is in:

/Users/{username}/Library/Preferences/Tonium/Pacemaker/music.db

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