Hoster 4.11 & Songverter
 

I am not sure if I have the correct thread for these questions.
I am trying to use Hoster 4.11 with Windows 7. I am confused about the use as I have all my songs in a zip format on an external hard drive. They play just fine. My laptop hard drive will not accommodate all the files from my external hard drive to be imported. I would like to keep my external hard drive as my source.

When I imported some files to the laptop to see what happens, the file names were changed and stored on my laptop. Now this is ok as now I can do a search in Hoster and find songs from the ones I imported. I can see how that works. But still all the files on the external hard drive will not fit on the laptop.

So, is it to my advantage to buy the Songverter to change all the ZIP files on the external hard drive to KMA so that the I can use Hoster to search for a song when needed? Does anyone have a clue about this?

No, you do not need songverter for this. The zips still have to be imported as kma's, and can be placed in a folder within the ext. HD as well. That would be your best betespecially if your laptop cannot hold all the kma's. I have all my kma's on several backup HD's and the zips backed up on another.

Dale, you may want to move this to Hoster help as it really pertains to H4.11.

Songverter does not help, because it does not add any BookID, so Hoster doesn't know what to do with them.
In Hoster on the Import from hard drive utility, set the "Save to" folder to a location on your external drive.
If you do not have more free space on that drive as you have used for the zip files then you need a second external to do this. Hoster actually extracts the MP3 and cdg files to put them in the KMA file, so they take a slight amount more of space than the zips.

Hoster 4.11 & Songverter
 

Thanks for the direction I am trying that now with a few songs as a test drive. When I used the import and saved the files to the laptop hard drive I was happy to see the "search" worked great. Would the songverter change the kma files to the correct names after I import them to the external HD?

No. You cannot change the names on the KMA files or the database will not be able find them for Search or to add them to the playlist. KMA filenames generally are the DiskID-Track.KMA and if you change this Hoster will not be able to find them.

If you want to change any of the names it is best to do it from the Tools/ Edit Songs, that way the search will still be able to find them.

Roy that won't change the file name which I believe is what he was asking.

Yes you are right Dale, I misunderstood his problem.:f

Roy.

Hoster 411 & Songverter
 

Dale you are correct. Although I have imported some files to see how it will work and "Save As" to my external hard drive and that worked just fine. Trial and error I found some files were not imported. So I clicked on the import screen again, after getting rid of all the newly imported files with "rebuild", I checked "ignore-ignore-title-artist" and that gives me the search ability for all the files I imported. Although when I look at the KMA folder, I haven't a clue which files are what or who. It would be great to be able to see what is what. But I can live with it as I have backup HD's with files still in the zip format. Thanks for your help

KMA files have always been set up with the DiskID and Track Number as the file name. This makes the file names shorter and this helps if you have a long path. Windows does have a limit on the number of characters in a path.

Are you ignoring the DiskID and Track when you import or is this other information that Hoster can't use? Also, after you have imported tracks you do not have to "rebuild" as those files that imported are automatically added to the database.