Subject: Re: [Usher Talk] Usher on 2 Macs with one shared library

From: Rob Griffiths <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 28 Jan 2013 05:40:20 -0800

On Jan 27, 2013, at 6:36 PM, EG Arnold wrote:

> Is this possible? My main machine is a MacPro, but there are lots of times when I work on my Mac laptop and I'd like to work on both platforms using Usher.

In theory, it's possible. In reality, the current version of Usher wasn't built to support this, so you need to be very very careful with it. Here's what you'd need to do:

First and foremost, never ever ever ever ever -- and I mean never! -- run Usher on both Macs at the same time. This would be Very Bad. If you're going to do this, you need to make absolutely certain you only run Usher on one Mac at a time. That's because in order to make it work, you need to share a single file between both Macs. Opening that file at the same time in two places would, quite quickly, corrupt the file.

With that warning heeded, what you'd need to do is, on the Mac Pro, set up Usher's main library file location (and any supplemental libraries) to be on a networked drive visible to both Macs. Once that's all done, i.e. the movie files have all been processed and Usher is ready to use, quit Usher on the Mac Pro and go to the laptop.

On the laptop, set the library and supplemental library locations to match what you're using on the Mac Pro, and let Usher process the files again. 

Once that's done, you should be able to see and use one library between the two Macs. As noted, though, if you ever forget to quit Usher on one Mac before opening it on another, you may completely corrupt the library file. (The movie files themselves will be fine, but any work you did with tagging, smart playlists, etc. could be lost.)

One final caveat is that Usher can be quite slow with a networked movie collection, especially if you've got a lot of MKV (and possibly other non-QuickTime-native) formatted movies.

regards,
-rob.

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From: EG Arnold <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 27 Jan 2013 18:36:06 -0800 (PST)

Is this possible? My main machine is a MacPro, but there are lots of times 
when I work on my Mac laptop and I'd like to work on both platforms using 
Usher.

Thoughts?

Thanks.