MediaMonkey in a Shared / Networked Environment

Your MediaMonkey library can be shared in various ways. You can use DLNA (UPnP) to share your media files and Playlists for streaming on the local network, Sync your media and Playlists to portable devices or share the actual database file.

Stream Media Files on the Local Network

Via Tools > Options > Media Sharing from the Main Menu you can setup MediaMonkey to make available your media files to any DLNA capable client on your network. For more on DLNA sharing from MediaMonkey for Windows see the Online Help: Help: Streaming to other Devices (UPnP / DLNA). Clients can’t modify media files over DLNA.

Sharing your Media Files

You can choose to just share your media files on the local network directly. In this scenario you’d have MediaMonkey on each PC scan the media files directly and play them directly and each user manages their own library. This method won’t allow for play history and playlist sharing. Each user could update metadata (unless you make files read-only) and this affects all other users.

Synchronization

With synchronization you can copy media files and playlists to portable devices or cloud services (MediaMonkey 5) which allows the device to have a local copy and not rely on a local network connection to MediaMonkey. For Android devices with MediaMonkey for Android and Apple devices this includes the ability to sync back certain metadata to your MediaMonkey library.

Sharing the MediaMonkey Database

By default, MediaMonkey’s MediaMonkey.ini file is configured for single user access to a locally stored database. However, it is possible to change these settings so that multiple users can share a database stored to a common location.

To set up such a shared environment:

  1. On a machine that has MediaMonkey installed, scan a network location that will contain your music by pasting it into the Scan Folders dialog. It is preferable to scan a UNC path rather than a mapped drive. e.g.
    \\ip _address\path (almost always works)
    \\computer_name\path (often works)
    J: (mapped network drive sometimes fail to be recognized)
  2. Close MediaMonkey (so that it doesn’t overwrite any of the changes)
  3. Back up the MediaMonkey.ini file.
  4. If sharing the database on the same PC to different Windows Users, move the MediaMonkey.ini file to the Program Files/MediaMonkey directory. This will cause all users to have the same MediaMonkey settings, however, you must make sure that all users have permission to read/write to this directory.
  5. Save the MediaMonkey database to a shared folder e.g.
    C:\MM Shared library\mm.db or \\ip _address\path\mm.db (\\computer_name\path\mm.db)
  6. For each machine that is accessing the database, edit the MediaMonkey.ini file so that it uses the customized location of the database.
  7. Start MediaMonkey to ensure that your MediaMonkey database file has correctly set permissions so that all users can read/write to the database.

NOTES

  • MediaMonkey uses SQLite as the back end database, and it isn’t designed as a multi-user/networked database, so although this approach works, it is unsupported. Test this approach in your local environment carefully before deploying. More about SQLite in a networked/multi-user environment:
    http://www.sqlite.org/whentouse.html
    http://www.sqlite.org/lockingv3.html
  • MediaMonkey accesses the database often which can result in a slower experience when accessing the database over a networked connection. To improve performance, MediaMonkey can be configured to perform certain database operations in memory instead of over the network. This improves performance, but reduces reliability of the SQLite database primarily if the connection to the DB is lost while a database operation is in progress (e.g. if an external HD containing the DB is removed or in case of a WiFi/Wired connection loss). To configure this, make the following change in each instance of MediaMonkey.ini (the default value is 0):

    [SYSTEM]
    SQLitePageToMemory=1;

  • MediaMonkey Server is in development which would also allow for a shared database between different installation of MediaMonkey 5: https://www.mediamonkey.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=31
  • If the files are greyed out on one of the machines when viewing or playing them, see: Why is Music Greyed Out / Fails to Play?


Applies to: ,

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