Importing data already in its destination

senseivita

I've being going around this for a while now trying to read in between the lines in the docs if importing music and manage it is supported, I find no answer.

Importing in place states clearly that these files won't be touched. So, it isn't much useful. Next option would be the cumbersome, wasteful and long process of duplicating the data to another place and then back.

I mounted an NFS share and first I symlinked it to /srv/funkwhale/data/music/musicagain as suggested, with /srv/funkwhale/data/music itself being another NFS symlink on its own*, the importer recognized only the parent folder in the GUI, I didn't felt confident enough to go on and kept looking how to import in place without "in-place". I found nothing and ended up here. 🙂 The files are already where they're supposed to be, and I'd like Funkwhale to manage them, what happens if I try to import them? It's specifically mentioned in the docs that duplicates are detected and I don't remember the action taken, but regardless, would it not work here?

Thanks for your help, hopefully I can start using Funkwhale soon.

*: my server has a tiny system disk, as most of them do, and endless mounted NFS space available—I'm not comfortable confining data into virtual disks

gcrk

[unknown] manage it

What exactly do you mean by manage it? Funkwhale has no intention to manage your library in classical folder structures, it won't create something like artist/album/track.mp3 structure or something. If you want to use the music library for other tools (eg nextcloud), use the in-place import and edit the directory as you like with a tool of you choice.

senseivita

I'm sorry for the delay, I had signed up with GitHub but it's not there anymore. Only now I got in.

The docs say that if I, for instance, remove an user; all of their files would be removed as well. That's what I meant with managed. I was holding off using the instance until I got an answer because I did know (still don't) how would FW would react importing a library already in the place were libraries are imported.

To be honestly, I'm still unaware of Funkwhale's capabilities. I thought there's would be some way of moving things (music) on and off the appliance and metadata retrieval/editing to begin with. Y'know… managing. But like I said, the only time I've spent on Funkwhale was designing a banner image and writing silly stuff in policy boxes. AFAIK, Funkwhale is like an Airsonic/Subsonic with extras. 🙂

gcrk

senseivita Sorry for the inconvenience with our forum, Flarum disabled all plugins from time to time and we are investigating, until then the social logins might go away for a while.

senseivita The docs say that if I, for instance, remove an user; all of their files would be removed as well

Thats not true for in-place-import. If you use this, Funkwhale wont touch your music library. You could even mount it read-only to be sure.

You basically have two options:

Have all you music only in Funkwhale, import it however. Funkwhale will put the files where it things its clever (depends on eg the storage backend) and consume it from there.
Use the in-place-import, which makes all the music available at Funkwhale as well, but you wont be able to delete or move files from Funkwhale.

senseivita

gcrk Oh I see. That clears things up a whole lot more

Sidenote: I always prefer using my email address vs federated identities but it was sort of an accident and since I was already logged into GitHub...I just went with it.
I eventually was able to reset my password and break free from GitHub anyway--no harm.

I'm still lost on what happens if the files are already in the place where Funkwhale would organize them further. The upper bullet point. Would it just claim them and do what it needs to? Or would it see this as an anomaly, and try to correct it by erroring out (maybe followed by crashing), ignoring it, deleting unaccounted data...

I don't mind at all for it taking ownership and sole of the files. In fact, I would prefer it to have a single authority over these files, however, rewriting them over again seems unnecessary and a little wasteful. I That's why I'm trying to placing them right where they would end--sort of like you (used to) place music in your iTunes (or AIMP, Music Bee, Media Monkey, etc) music directory then have it discover and organize its discoveries while at the same time (in the case of iTunes) it would make them part of their library when you at that moment couldn't touch them anymore because it (unlike AIMP and the others) isn't running background discovery all the time.

I have backups, but it is still a lot of small-files data to move around. I'll snapshot the VM and try with a small batch, I guess. I don't know why didn't I thought of this earlier. My bad!

gcrk

senseivita I'm still lost on what happens if the files are already in the place where Funkwhale would organize them further. The upper bullet point. Would it just claim them and do what it needs to? Or would it see this as an anomaly, and try to correct it by erroring out (maybe followed by crashing), ignoring it, deleting unaccounted data...

It would not even noticing the until you do a in-place-import.

If you run an inplace-import on a directory which is at the same time the directory where Funkwhale stores its media files, it might cause some trouble. No idea. This is just an undefined state.

If you want to share the same collection of files with another service, just mount it and run an inplace import whenever something changes. This is exactly the usecase this feature was built for.