After importing my entire music library into Windows Media Player 11 at least 10 times – which is not a happy experience – I’ve been compelled to write a bit about how to get WMP 11 and Vista offline files to play nice together. The basic idea is that all of my media is stored on my desktop (home) computer, which runs windows XP. I also have a laptop which i want to mirror my music collection on. I found the easiest way to do this (without having to worry about a third-party solution like rsync) was to use the Vista offline files feature. Both machines also use WMP11 to play the music library.
The whole process is quite easy, until something goes wrong (but I’ll get to that later). Firstly, on your other machine (e.g your laptop), you need to navigate to the folder on your main machine which holds all of your music collection (e.g \\DESKTOP\media\music), assuming that it is already shared on the network. Following this, right click on your music folder and click “Always Available Offline”. Vista will then copy all of the data across the network so that a mirror copy is kept locally on your machine. This process may take a while, depending on the speed of your connection and the size of your music library – which is why it would be best to “plug in” a laptop’s ethernet port to your network instead of using a wireless connection. Once this process has completed, you can drag your music folder into your “home” folder while holding the Ctrl and Shift keys (to create a shortcut) – alternatively, pull up a console and type mklink /D c:\users\YOURUSERNAME\music\LINKNAME \\COMPUTERNAME\PATH\TO\music – obviously replacing all the stuff in capitals with your appropriate data e.g mine ended up being “mklink /D c:\users\matt\music\albums \\DESKTOP\media\music\albums“.
Now, the important part, unplug your laptop (or other machine) from the network and make sure you turn off wireless as well – just to make sure that you are using the offline copy and not the copy on the network. Then open windows media player 11, click on the little arrow pointing downwards at the bottom of the Library tab and click “Add to Library”. Then click “Add” and navigate to that link that you created just after making your offline copies. Click Ok to close that dialogue and the folder should have been added which should look something like “\\DESKTOP\media\music\albums” which is what I had. Click Ok and let WMP11 take its ungodly amount of time to add all of your files to its database. The good news is now you’re done! You will be able to play your music from the offline copy when you have limited or no connectivity and you won’t get choppy-ness if your wireless starts acting up. The bad news is that this isn’t perfect and sometimes I have had bugs where WMP11 will load up without the album art and stuff like that. A simple reload of WMP11 seems to fix this.
If stuff goes wrong: In short, if stuff goes wrong during this process, things get messy. For example, sometimes Vista seems to have an impossible time deleting offline copies of files if you no longer need them. The best way to fix this, I found, was to boot up into safe mode with command prompt (by pressing F8 before the Vista boot screen appears). When the command prompt comes up, you need to navigate to where these offline files are stored using “cd c:\windows\csc\v2.0.6\namespace“. If you list the directory and owners (“dir /Q“) you will notice that all of the directories have no owner (well i did anyway) which means that you can’t navigate into them and change them. The directory names also correspond to the names of the hosts on the network which host the source of your offline files. You need to take ownership of these directories in order to delete any unwanted offline files. Do this using “takeown /R /F *” which essentially means “take ownership of everything in this directory and all subdirectories”. You can then delete any unwanted files using “rmdir /S COMPUTERNAME\PATH\TO\SHARENAME” (in my case it would be “rmdir /S DESKTOP\media\music“).
Now your music should be accessable on your laptop, or whatever, from whereever you are. Hope you enjoyed my first post and please add any comments or suggestions!
Useful References:
Re: How to change CSC folder location in Vista?
Keep everything in sync with Windows Vista’s Sync Center
EDIT: Warning! Don’t change the name of the share on your host computer. Vista seems to identify shares by name, so it will no longer recognize the files.
