Anyways, long story short – un-installing NOD32 and installing Microsoft Security Essentials (which is more than good enough anyways) seems to let me sync things. Jungle Disk is still giving odd errors but I’ll see if I can work through them.

Not ready to ditch Dropbox yet — but it does keep reminding me I’m getting close to running out of space :/

Problem with dropbox’s paid service however, was that I was using only 2gb. It seemed like overkill to upgrade to a 50gb account for $10/month. I then remembered from a while back when I was first looking into cloud backup/sync software of one called Jungle Disk. It sounded great – uses Amazon S2 (as does dropbox) but with an open source client that gave you far more controla. Only reason I went with dropbox was because it was free and suited my needs at the time. So, it was time to give Jungle Disk another shot.

The sign up, payment and install processes went without a hitch. I decided to go with the “Jungle Disk Desktop” version, and hey turned out that with the base monthly fee they decided to include 5gb storage too – great! Payment was processed instantly and away I went!

On installing the program, it presents you with a wizard to help you set up your first ‘drive’. I figured I’d just enable all options and go from there – whether that’s a good thing or not I don’t know. To begin with, I wanted to sync my “My Dropbox” folder and if all goes well, I’d start with other folders too maybe – who knows? Yea, never got that far though. I set it to my drop box folder and let it sync over night. Waking up in the morning and expecting it to be complete I instead see several errors complaining it wasn’t able to upload one file or another and failed. It didn’t just skip the file (which from what I can tell, it’s supposed to!) but kept trying that same file over and over again until it finally gave up. So I figured, yea sure first time with the software – maybe it’s conflicting with dropbox already running in the background? So I gave that a close, and tried again. It got to the same file and stopped. No errors this time though (I was only able to check because of the logs I turned on from curiosity). Made changes to files? NEVER updated. I tried viewing what was saved on my disk via the virtual network drive – it only got bits of 2 main folders from about a dozen. Horrible!

Essentially, I’ve spent the last two days fighting with a horrible piece of software. It’s been constantly crashing on me whenever I try to make changes to configuration. And I’ve been making config changes trying to get it to sync successfully, if only just once! But every time it starts syncing, it gets to the same files and goes into an endless loop. Click cancel on the upload for that file? And it crashes! One of the files it was hanging up on was insignificant, so I decided to delete it but sure enough it finds another file to hang on.

I got frustrated to the point where I’ve decided to delete the virtual disk and try starting again. See where that leads me. If it -still- fails then I’ll contact support and see if the money I’m paying is worth it at all. If not, then I guess I’ll find something else. I’ve recently learned of another service called Mozy that seems to offer unlimited backup for around the same price as Jungle Disk’s base price but unlimited hosting of anything always makes me weary – more research would definitely be required. I’ve also been toying around with using Microsoft Mesh but the software is still a bit sluggish and doesn’t always sync properly. It also has no revision history which I’ve found can be VERY helpful!

Anyone else have any experience with Jungle Disk or other online backup/sync solutions? Any recommendations?

The current process goes somewhat like this:

• Open premiere.
  • Add our background image.
  • Add the mp3 file in an audio track.
  • Change the background image’s length to match the audio track.
  • Render (or queue) the file to be made into a video (usually an .flv).
• Go to youtube.
  • Upload the video(s).
  • Enter all the information: title, tags, description, etc…
  • Wait for it to process and get the embed code.
• Go to our blog.
  • Write a new post.
  • Add the same title, same tags, etc…
  • Set it’s category (dub/dnb/etc…)
  • Add the album art, and our embedded video below.
  • Save and publish the post.

As you can see, this can be quite the lengthy process for each video. So I figured I should be able to create my own program to make this easier.

My intended work flow would try to simplify a lot of the processes. So far, I see it working something like this:

• Open program
  • If it’s the first time, put in your youtube+wordpress login info
• Add all the mp3 files to be converted
• Set the background image
• For each mp3 file, enter the main information (extracting from ID3 tags first if possible). This includes:
  • Artist name, song title, album art, tags (using the tags from wordpress), category (using the categories from wordpress), background image (defaulting to a single image to be used on all tracks but can be changed for individual songs if required.)
• Click a button to render+upload.
  • The program will then render all the files to videos, upload them to youtube and fill in all data, get the embed code and make a wordpress post with all data as well.

Seems a hell of a lot simpler to me.

I started work on this last night, and so far I’ve got a basic program I’ve written up in C#. Right now it has the functionality there to be able to convert batches of mp3s to video files (I’m using windows media 9 to convert to wmv files – can’t seem to figure out how to make it an FLV file.) It also already logs in to your youtube account and I can get data from there, but haven’t figured out the uploading yet.

All in all, I figure this would make a cool week-long-ish project for me to do during the break so we’ll see how it goes

So far I’ve figured out how to get the ‘creeps’/crowd to spawn, but they run in the opposite direction I want them to and then off the map lol.

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