[eichelbe]

Hi,

in the last months I made some experiences with the MSP synchronization among tablets that I wanted to share my story with you. Might be it leads to some insights...

I use two tables, one more or less as master and one as (display) slave. Initially, I used bidirectional sync (sorry, forgot the name) of all information and it worked nicely and fast (more than 1000 songs in my database, chordpro and PDF mixed, some with audio attached, about 900MB). However, and that's my fault, I accidentally made annotations on the slave tablet or tried to edit song metadata here and there, in particular while the tablets were connected by bluetooth. This led to some synchronization conflicts and also to accidental overriding of information, probably as I made the wrong decisions.  Mea culpa.

So I decided to switch to one way synchronization so that the master overrides the slave. Right from the beginning this appeared to be rather slow compared with the bidirectional sync, although it seemed to me that less communication should be needed. Sometimes still synchronization conflicts occurred - rather puzzling. Suddenly, after several months, the sync did not work correctly anymore and the song display on both tables got confused, i.e., unrelated pages songs were shown together in one "song". 

I decided to completely clean the slave tablet and to do the one way synchronization right from the beginning. I was surprised, although the initial sync took some time (of course) all subsequent syncs (now for a month or so) were pretty fast and without conflicts  

1) Could it be the case that switching synchronziation modes can lead to strange effects and inconsistencies? If yes, I think it could be helpful to issue a warning when the user wants to switch the modes or even to recommend that in specific cases cleaning the target library should be done before.

2) Explicitly locking the slave, e.g., through a setting disabling any edit functionalty until the setting is reverted could prevent (at least me) from accidental and unintended edits on the slave. Might be this could also be helpful for others. Just a thought...

As I wrote... just a story and some experiences. Might be it helps others... I'm still very happy with MSP 

Please take care and stay healty...
Holger