Lately, I’ve been getting back into buing actual CDs and ripping them to my music library. This was sparked by re-discovering my old iPod Classic, which I used to use extensively before streaming services took over. Back then, my muisc library was on one computer, but now I have multiple computers and I want to keep my music library in sync without a lot of hassle.

I was looking into NAS, cloud storage, and other solutions, but for what I needed they all felt like overkill. I just wanted to use my Mac as the source and then sync the music library to my Linux computer occasionally. Something similar to git, but for files. Turns out, there’s a great tool for this already built into most operating systems.

Setting up SMB and rsync

I had never used rsync before and to my surprise, it turned out to be exactly what I needed. It’s a tool used to sync files and directories between two locations, either on the same machine or over a network. This makes the process of syncing more delibarete so I don’t have to worry about corrupted files like with some cloud solutions.

1. Make the library accesible on my network: The music library needed to available on my network, so that the other computer can access it. On my Mac, I enabled “File Sharing” to spin up an SMB share. I needed to enable “Windows File Sharing” to make SMB work on Linux, which wasn’t entirely obvious.
2. Sync library to the other computer: On the linux computer, I can now mount the SMB share and use the rsync command to sync the music library.

rsync -av --delete --exclude='.DS_Store' --exclude='.localized' "/path/to/smb/share" "/path/to/music/library"

• -a stands for “archive” mode, which preserves file permissions and timestamps.
• -v is for “verbose”, so I can see what’s happening.
• --delete option ensures that any files deleted from the source are also removed from the destination, avoiding duplicates.
• --exclude options are used to skip unnecessary system files that macOS creates.

To make life easier, I stored the command as a shell script. I also piped the output to a log file using tee, which might be useful for debugging.

☀ Note: The music library path should be pointed where the actual music files are, which on macOS is not ~/Music but something like ~/Music/Music/Media.localized/Music/.

Conclusion

The only caveat with this setup is that the SMB share needs to be mounted before running the script and I need to remember to not modify files on the destination computer. Nothing bad will happen if I do, but the changes will be overwritten during the next sync. Overall‚ I’m very happy with the simplicity of this solution and it works for my needs.