Managing Music/photo files on Network

[Ernie]

Hi All,

I have a family of five, and between us over the passed few years have download music files (mp3's itunes etc), uploaded cd's, photos and short videos onto two Pc's and a Laptop as part of a network.

As you can imagine, there are files everywhere, and I've never quite had the time to sort out filing sharing (i think I've allowed certain files shared over time, but they are fairly irelevant).

How do you manage your files? How would you capture all music and photo's from all computers. I did stumble across a utility on Media player that capture music (and all game logos ) on one comptuer some time ago.

I think I'd like to put everyting on an external HDD as well for security.

Any advice, thanks.

 

[whiskycycle]

Consider this: was in the same predicament as yourself until I started using Windows Home Server. Got a nice quiet box that's got a stack of HDs installed, holding music, pics, vids, software etc for all the PCs in the house.

Definitely worth the effort of putting one together (or buying an off-the-shelf model) and getting everything onto it. Capturing everything, for me, meant trawling through the machines and carting everything across manually - time consuming, but worth doing.

As far as capturing files, I shifted everything of the relevant type to the default shares on the WHS box. Windows Media Player on each PC points to the Music share and uses that for playback and recording. Same goes for the Videos share, which gets archived videos from the Media Centre PC. Photos are currently done with a manual dump from the memory card, although I do need to start tinkering with them using Adobe Photoshop Elements 7 and using the library management tool it offers.... wouldn't mind getting a wireless photo frame now and pointing it at the photo share (that'll keep the missis happy for me)!

Juggling all those files across 4 machines previously was a mess. Now it isn't a mess stored centrally (and backed up to a couple of external HDs regularly).

 

[lsg1r]

I'm basically doing similar but I'm just using a generic nas rather than home server.

All I do is map a folder(s) to a drive letter (same on each pc) from my nas (in my case a synology) to my pc's for music, video's (it has upnp folders for these which is handy ) etc.
Then its just a case of leaving the nas on (it is anyways in my case) and setting up said programs to rip to drive/folder and monitor it. It's fine with most media players but itunes doesn't seem to like monitoring too much so you may need to use a sync tool for itunes to match up.