Zen sync without copying entire library?

elven

I've finally done my mega tagging and reorganisation process (used mediamonkey and a fantastic little program called Nerxy File Organiser) and now i have everything in one place on my hard drive.

I wanted to sync the zen (16gb, the model from before the x-fi came out) with any extra songs i add to that directory and update any tags i change on existing songs but it looks like when i tell it to sync from medimonkey or from the zen sync software that came with the thing, it has to go through a complete copying process that takes half an hour or so.

Surely 'sync' means update with changes, not re-copy the whole lot every time!? I've just downloaded winamp to see if that does the job, does anyone else know anything about this? Halp!

pleasant Co.

Sync means that the library on your computer and the library on your DAP (in this case the ZEN) will be identical after every sync.

If you change some detail (like file name, genre, track title, artist name, year, etc) in any music file in your computer library the next time you sync the file will have to be re-transferred, with the old file on the ZEN being deleted....some things like playcount don't require the file to be re-transferred.

This is how it works with itunes at least, I'd imagine Mediamonkey is the same.

If you change the details of a whole bunch of stuff then MediaMonkey will have to re-transfer that bunch so that the two libraries match. Surely you don't intend on changing details all that often, do you? given that you've already reorganised everything how you like it.

elven

That's how i expected it to work, so it only had to re-transfer/overwrite the files that actually had been changed. I plugged it in and tried it with WMP, mediamonkey, and the creative software and all three of them wanted to copy the entire library up to the thing. I'd even go as far as to use itunes (don't tell anyone else i said that, k?) but it won't recognise the zen...

pleasant Co.

Just to confirm:

1. you synced your new clean library between mediamonkey and the zen, all good.

2. then you resynced that same library with the same zen and mediamonkey wanted to re-transfer the entire library over again? despite the two libraries being the same?

or are you continuously moving between different sources? (WMP, MM, Creative's software)

elven

Hmmm I wonder if you're onto something there.

I did all the sorting and cleaning up of the files (in mediamonkey) while they were on an external drive. I used the zen software to format the player. I used mediamonkey sync function to do the original upload to the player, but also copied the music to my local drive to save me carting the external drive about with me. Today I made changes to that local copy - here's a tricky bit - using a different installation of mediamonkey on the other partition of my laptop (i'm dual boot vista/xp) and tried to sync them that's when it wanted to copy the whole thing up again.

Is it because it's a different copy of mediamonkey and different path that it's having trouble maybe?

I'll format the thing again and do the upload, then try a sync and see if it does the same thing... cheers