How To... Manually Backup Your Editor's Music Library

Step-by-step instructions on how to....
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Sox
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How To... Manually Backup Your Editor's Music Library

Post by Sox » Sat Sep 29, 2012 11:16 pm

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 may automated this process by adding a feature to PMExplorer if it would be of interest?

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
  • 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

gogo

Re: How To... Manually Backup Your Editor's Music Library

Post by gogo » Tue Jun 14, 2016 3:54 am

Is there any known way to consolidate ausio files into a folder structure? Over tve tears I have been adding tracks from my music folder, from iTunes folder structure, from an external hard disk and from a NAS system. In iTunes tracks are usually being copied into a folder structure on import, so if you want to backup or transfer them it's just that whole folder tree you have to consider. In Pacemaker Editor all files would have to stay in the exact location where they were when they've been added.

Is there any tool that could copy / move them together?

Sox
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Re: How To... Manually Backup Your Editor's Music Library

Post by Sox » Thu Jul 14, 2016 11:22 pm

You are correct in that the editor expect the files to stay where they were when you originally imported them.

I could propose 3 options:
1) Delete the files from your editor library, move their locations where you now prefer them to be, then re-import/re-analyse. This would probably mess up any mixes you have already records and not exported.

2) You could use a database editor that works on SQLite database and in theory you could run some SQL to relocate where your library thinks files are. See this post on the library DB structure and a proposed DB editor.

3) I think when I wrote the PMLExplorer tool I added a feature to find missing files. I am right then you could relocate your files, use PMDExplorer to identify missing files, then point it to the new location. I think you would have to do it on a file by file basis though, so may not be that practical. If you are a coder, can write in C and have Visual Studio, I can share the source code so you can make it more friendly to your needs if you like?
Never experiment with drugs.... you might waste them

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