Hello,
I have two laptops one office and one personal. The office laptop is a Lenovo T430s 16GB RAM running Windows 7 and the Personal Laptop is a hp Pavilion dm4 Laptop dual booted with Windows 7 and Fedora 14.
I have 3 music collections, one on my personal Laptop, one on office Laptop and another on an external HD. Is there any Unix/ Linux set of commands (say a shell script that uses rsync ) that can synchronize my music across all 3 devices?
Well, rsync syncs between 2 machines, and according to to the order of arguments passed (local/remote) it will delete unwanted files at the one, and copy new ones to the other.
You would need to define which device is your 'base' and sync from/to there.
But syncing between 3 exchangeable media is always risky and might result in accidently deleted files.
rsync would be a good choice, but i dont know the required arguemtns to make it 'safe'.
Argument to make it safe is actually --dry-run or -n
Combined with --log-file=FILE you can check the log before issuing actual action.
I don't think that you want rsync. If you want to rip CD's again you can look at using a script called adbcde with lame.
https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=linux%20adbcde%20lame
There are also utilities that will help you to edit the meta data. Doing those two things you should help you to get the various mp3's that you have under control. If you have the same album stored multiple times with different metadata, then rsync is not going to combine the various versions, but fixing the metadata should help you to find duplicates.