I know, that’s not a mathematically correct subject line. I apologize right up front for this.

The last “big purchase” for my tax money was a QNAP 219p II 2-bay NAS device to replace the aging, slow, finicky Western Digital single-drive NAS. To feed the QNAP I picked up a pair of 3-terabyte Seagate drives. What am I doing with triple the storage?

I’m using it to play music and movies, of course.

Stage One in this project involved synchronizing the living room and bedroom copies of MediaMonkey. You can point the software to a database file on a UNC path and a music library on a UNC path and as long as you don’t go crazy trying to run both copies at once it seems to work. Mind you, it took several tries to clear out the “local” parts of the library on each computer. MediaMonkey hates to let go of a directory once you’ve ever used it as part of your library. Three times I had to clear out the “duplicates” between the two machines. Also, while you can export a playlist to M3U out of the MediaMonkey library just fine, it takes a special add-in script to actually import an M3U.

What was I doing with M3Us? Exporting them, using a text editor to replace the paths, then importing so I’d have both of my “game night” playlists for downstairs and my portable-device sync playlist upstairs, all in the same library. Now I can update the game night playlists from upstairs any time I want. Sweet deal, eh?

Next up: Figuring out how to organize and present TV shows and movies.