Hey all!
Let me go stratight to the point:
I have an audio player in which I want to clone my ~/Music directory when I connect it to my computer. The only relevant thing about it is that it’s a barebones filesystem and I cannot run cool stuff like Syncthing on the player (otherwise this question would already have a solution). Right now, my solution is that I connect the player to the computer and manually copy file to and delete files in the player. As you may have guessed, this is an error prone process. In order to solve that, I want to run a single command that clones ~/Music (src) into /path/to/player/Music (dst).
My requirements are:
- All new files in
srcMUST be copied intodst. - All files no longer present in
srcMUST be deleted fromdst. - All files present in both
srcanddstthat have more recent modifications insrcMUST be copied and overwritten intodst.
As you can see, my player’s filesystem is a strict replica of my main computer’s. Now, I know I can write a Python script in an afternoon to do just that, but I want to know if there are any good tools first to do this. I searched the web in hope that rsync would help me here, but the only answers I can find are for buffier cp. It may be that I have a vocabulary problem and I’m not searching for the correct terms.
I’d love to read your ideas! A note about LLMs: I’m not interested at all in any comments about how llm-of-the-week coded this in a moment, I asked fake-chat and here’s what it said or whatever. If you are not a human that can be bothered to write an answer, I won’t be bothered to read it.
Thank you!
Don’t remember what all everything does but my default to move to my mp3 player is
systemd-inhibit rsync -avh --delete source dest
The systemd-inhibit is to keep it from falling asleep, --delete removes any files present at destination but not at source.
Out of curiosity, how do you organize your file formats? I have a mess of separate FLAC and separate MP3 files. I’ll just regularly convert all my FLAC to a mirrored directory of MP3s and copy that onto SD.
It’s a pain in the butt though.
I finally almost have 64gb of music the max on my SD card, so it’s time to start throwing music into an archive, too.
I don’t save FLAC files, as I don’t have that much space (my library is 82GB big with 17629 tracks atm). What I do is that I have a script I wrote to convert all the files to Opus. I still have some old mp3s laying around that I convert or find better sources over time.
As for rsync command, it’s taken far longer than I would like to sync all the files. I’ve gotten an idea about caching the filesystem status for later uses to speed up the process, so I may end up writing a script after all!
You know more than I do, I think, but how would writing the script speed up the file transfer?
The first time you use rsync, it’s going to take a long ass time because you are copying EVERY file. But after the first sync, you’re just copying changes, so it’ll take much less time.
I use fre:ac to convert things pretty trivially, but I suspect you may enjoy writing scripts, to which I say: enjoy!
I added some context here. The thing is that it still took ages because
stating every file is still very slow in my target player, so if I cache the status I can automatically create a script that just performs the required operations and run that.And yes, I do enjoy writing small utilities :p Thanks!
What’s your player?
I used to copy to the SD card, which was faster, but the dongle I bought from Walmart is really garbage and I realized I could plug directly into the player, but it’s much slower.
Even then, at a max of 64GB, I don’t think it takes more than 90 minutes to do a full transfer.
I’m enjoying my ownership music journey. Definitely the BEST part is going to thrift stores with 5 CDS/$1 and just exploring, rolling the dice. My latest find is some African jazz dude (Mokassa something or other). I don’t know why I can’t do the same thing on Spotify, but I think something about having the CD art and description physically right there to inform me, and that I literally know NOTHING about the music.
It is sad, though, because algoirthmic exploration would be a powerful thing, but it’s counter to the profit motive. Most people aren’t explorers, and the fear of having someone stop listening is too great, so all the paid-service algorithms play it WAY too safe, even within a genre it’s often “what is most popular with the most people”, so you can’t deep dive anything. What is the point? Much better off listening to an internet radio with a pen and paper handy to write down what you like.
It’s an Innioasis Y1, which I’m in the process of changing for another player because the filesystem gets stuck buffering many songs (like 1/5 or even more).
We don’t have thrift stores here, so I get my recommendations from friends! Algorithmic exploration is one thing I do miss from YouTube. Even though it was still on the safe side it got me to find many great albums. Nowadays I browse wikipedia pages for genres I’m interested in, the /mu/ essential charts (fuck 4chan but wow what a great resource) and conversations with friends and fedi <3
I like Innioasis but ultimately decided against it because the SD card is embedded in it; maybe yours is failing?
Thanks for the charts!
I actually replaced it! That’s why I’m positive that the issue is with the underlying filesystem driver. At the end of the day, it’s just running a basic Android KitKat with the Rockbox app on top. What player do you have? I’m considering getting a new one but have no clue what to get yet XD
i agree with shadow, just use rsync.
Why not rsync? Off the top of my head: rsync -avp --delete ~/Music /src/to/dst/ (leave the music off the dst path)
Stop googling and just read the rsync man page
Stop googling and just read the rsync man page
Fair enough, sometimes you get tunnel vision with a problem.
For what I see the command doing, thanks for the progress flag, it seems to be doing what I need. Reading the manual, it also looks like it’s not copying files that have the same size and timestamp in the source and destination, which is also what I wanted, even though I didn’t make it explicit. I’ll have to take a look to making the command parallel, probably by running it on every subdirectory of
~Musicat once.Thank you for your help!
rsync is made for quickly backing up huge directories over whatever connection. believe me you won’t need to script anything or parallelise it. just check the available flags.
You probably want an uppercase P.
rsync -avP --delete src/* dst/Oops, I did actually mean -p but that’s included in -a. Years of muscle memory doesn’t go away. -P is a good one too though.
I always remember alien vs Predator. And the Predator is uppercase because he’s more intelligent. And sometimes alien vz Predator if I want compression.
