THE SYSTEM INVENTORY

The system inventory is one of the two main databases that Harbor uses, and is really the heart of the Harbor Audio Manager. This is where Harbor stores all the information regarding the quantity, type, location and names of all the audio files on your system or visible network.

You do not have to enter any inventory information yourself; Harbor automatically builds the inventory database for you.

When you install Harbor and run it for the first time, one of the first things it does before displaying the main Launcher window is to rapidly scan your entire system – including floppy drives, hard drives, removable drives, CD-ROMs, RAM drives and visible network drives – for all supported formats of digital audio files and playlist files, storing this information in the inventory database. The resulting inventory summary totals are what are displayed on your System Inventory view in the Data Viewer.

The length of this initial scan of course depends on the size of your system and network -- how many drives it has to scan, how fast those drives are and how many total files it has to scan through on each drive -- but considering the daunting task, it is a pretty fast process. On a typical system consisting of one floppy, three assorted hard drives totaling 26GB of storage, one CD-ROM and two networked drives from other PCs totaling another 14GB, an entire inventory scan resulting in almost two-thousand audio files found takes an average of under 14 seconds. Your times may vary, but probably not by much.

Once the inventory database is automatically built, Harbor is ready to rock. It does not need to rebuild the inventory each time Harbor is run; it operates directly from the database it built for itself.