# Any best practices for managing multiple libraries / devices?

**URL:** <https://discourse.beets.io/t/any-best-practices-for-managing-multiple-libraries-devices/1016>\
**Category:** Help\
**Created:** [November 28, 2019, 4:12pm UTC](https://discourse.beets.io/t/any-best-practices-for-managing-multiple-libraries-devices/1016 "2019-11-28T16:12:40Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![madecunningly](https://yyz1.discourse-cdn.com/flex029/user_avatar/discourse.beets.io/madecunningly/32/322_2.png) [@madecunningly](https://discourse.beets.io/u/madecunningly)\
**Post date:** [November 28, 2019, 4:12pm UTC](https://discourse.beets.io/t/any-best-practices-for-managing-multiple-libraries-devices/1016/1 "2019-11-28T16:12:40Z")

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So, I use beets for managing my music on my machine/server and it’s great. However, I’m attempting to set up a new MP3 player that has an SD card with more storage. I had intended to use beets queries to copy over music to the SD card location; however, it seems like it would be handy to be able to have a beets config.yaml for the device and manage the sd card as a second library.

I’ve been playing around with attempting to set the BEETSDIR, but have not managed to get my beets set up to recognize a config.yaml file other than the default. Part of this is that I find the BEETSDIR docs fairly shallow. Any one have more information on how to set up a second beets library config? Am I barking up the wrong tree for managing my mp3 player?

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**Author:** ![sposker](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/7ea924/32.png) [@sposker](https://discourse.beets.io/u/sposker)\
**Post date:** [November 30, 2019, 12:54am UTC](https://discourse.beets.io/t/any-best-practices-for-managing-multiple-libraries-devices/1016/2 "2019-11-30T00:54:21Z")

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One simple solution is to move the 3 important files into a new directory-- `config.yaml`, `library.db`, and `state.pickle`. Then you can create a new `config.yaml` file and start a new db. When you are done, move the files back and your main library will be unaffected.