Travel DAP workflow

Tinkering
1

I have owned a Questyle QP1R DAP for travel, which I upgraded this week to a QP2R. My music collection is way larger than even the 400GB microSD card on my QP2R. I typically listen to whole albums. Here’s my workflow to keep the DAP’s microSD card in sync with my Roon library:

  1. Tag the albums I want to travel with with tag “Travel”
  2. Periodically, export to Excel (XLS file) all the tracks with “Travel” tag
  3. Convert the XLS file to CSV using LibreOffice on my Mac
  4. Run a small Python script that reads the CSV file and creates a clone directory tree to the tree given by the file paths for each of the tracks in the CSV file. The clone tree does not have the actual music files, but instead symbolic links to those files in my master music storage (a Synology NAS)
  5. Mount the DAP microSD card on my Mac
  6. Use a backup/sync program on the Mac (Chronosync, which I strongly recommend) to sync the clone tree to the microSD card, setting a flag to materialize the symbolic links (not the default)
  7. Unmount the microSD card, rescan it to pick the new files on the DAP

A bit laborious, but if anyone is interested, happy to share the Python code and advice.

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This is pretty awesome and super nerdy. :smile:

I just picked up my first DAP today (Shanling M5S) and a bit overwhelmed at the prospect of syncing a 400GB card when it arrives tomorrow. It’s already been more challenging than I’d like on the 64GB card I had handy. My collection is on the network attached to an external drive.

Think my plan will be a combo / trial of MediaMonkey and SyncToy. Not sure I want a separate directory for MediaMonkey on the disk, but don’t think it will make much difference unless I browse by folder vs artist and album.