creating program copy?

aeburkot

please bear with me, i am not at all fluent in code or programming, and i don't even know if what i'm asking is even really feasible

i've been a zotero user for at least a decade at this point, and i absolutely love version 7, excellent work, team. i would love to have a program with the exact same functionality as the zotero database (perhaps without any of the web/syncing) to store my large digital sheet music collection. is it possible to download the open source code from github, tweak it slightly, then run the tweaked version alongside the official zotero program as two different programs?

again, i have no idea if this is something that can be done, but i figured i'd ask the experts! thanks very much :)

tim820

If you just want a separate Zotero library for your sheet music collection (with syncing turned OFF), you can set up a separate profile. You would then append -P to the shortcut that starts Zotero in your OS, which will allow you to select which profile you want to use each time (you don't need to use the command line interface as described in the link below). It's the same way that multiple profiles work in Firefox (the underlying code of Zotero). As always, you should have very good backups of both libraries.
https://www.zotero.org/support/kb/multiple_profiles

You can run multiple instances of Zotero at the same time, with some cautions.
https://www.zotero.org/support/kb/multiple_instances

Those approaches require some care and careful setup. But they're much easier than compiling your own version of the software.

Another option would be to use just one library, but use linked files for your digital sheet music PDFs (linked files cannot be synced). PDFs could be dragged into Zotero as links to their original file locations (not copied), by holding down Ctrl+Shift (Windows/Linux) or Cmd+Option (Mac) while dropping (as described at the link below).
https://www.zotero.org/support/attaching_files#linked_files