Newbie question about sync

[Choco Girl]

Hi all,
I have searched the faq and the wiki, but can't find what I'm looking for, so I'm hoping someone can point me to an answer, or a section of the FAQ that answers my questions!

I'm trying to figure out exactly what "sync" does. My problem is that the hard drive in the PC my phatnoise was synced to has crashed, so I have lost all my MP3s - yes, I stupidly hadn't got around to doing backups yet . The copies on my DMS still exist though. I want to re-sync my DMS up to my other PC, with a shiny new hard drive. I'm going to have to re-rip all my CDs again, but I was hoping I could get a head start by copying stuff off the DMS onto my PC, instead of starting everything from scratch. Is this possible? I installed the Music Manager software on my other PC, and I could view all the songs on the DMS, but I can't see a way to get files from the DMS to the PC. Is phatbox a one-way system only? I'm scared to press the sync button in case it nukes everything on the DMS! I'm hoping someone more knowledgeable can assuage my fears

Thanks!

[Firefox]

First thing to do is look in Windows Explorer while your DMS is plugged into the cradle. You'll see a drive letter with the label PHTDTA. If you look in there you'll see the folders with your music files in them. Just copy them back to your PC using Windows Explorer then at least then you'll have some of the music back there.

I never found a way to sync back from the DMS to the PC using Phatnoise MUSIC Manager. I know Phatnoise MEDIA Manager can be set to do that but i have always found it to be SO slow with my collection (>10K files) that it was totally unusable. I was even a beta tester for PMediaM but never worked well enough for me. I went back to PMusicM and it serves me very well.

Depends on you Playlist needs, but I tend to have my main Playlists by artist and i store them on my PC that way too. I found that the easiest way to create them in bulk at the start when using Phatnoise MUSIC Manager is as follows:
- In the Library view of PMusicM look at the bottom item in the list on left side - should be Media Explorer. Open that up and find the root PC folder where your music files are kept. e.g. for me it is D:\MP3 Files.
- Click on the MP3 Files folder name on the left side (or whatever yours is) and on the right pane a list of the subfolders appears.
- Click on any subfolder in the right pane and then CTRL-A to select all of them
- Then right click on the right pane and the top item in the context menu should say something like "Create 207 playlists, 1 Playlist per Directory". Select it and bingo - you have 207 playlists.

After that you can delete any you don't want or add others to suit.

Hope this helps you or someone else a bit!

[Choco Girl]

Ah, thanks very much Firefox! I hadn't thought of just browsing it like a regular drive, that should do the trick nicely.