MusicCabinet - artist radio, genre radio & related artists

[hakko]

1. Ah sorry now I get it. I felt it was just cluttering but I guess I should put it back but make it configurable to use!

2. Oh well, it's a bit confusing how that page changes behavior depending on what MusicCabinet is doing. Good it got solved quickly!

[PiX64]

So --- Thanks to Hakko's direction I was able to get things setup.

Setup postgresql database on my SageTV Server
granted access to ports via firewall
modified the
pg_hba.conf file to allow a connection from my unraid/subsonic server

Popped open the war file in eclipse
modified the connection string
rebuilt the war
deployed
restarted subsonic services
BAM!

working. I am currently in the process of building the database.

Thanks for the help all.

I will gladly help anyone with a simliar setup as It took a few steps to get it running.

thanks!

[hakko]

I like stories with a (hopefully) happy ending like this! Good call about the postgres configuration - it's very secured by default. I hope you noticed that MusicCabinet versions prior to 0.5.45 have a bug that could possibly under some circumstances stall the import of artist biographies?

Also, for less tech savvy people reading this, it shouldn't be necessary to install Eclipse and rebuild the subsonic.war - just open it using WinZip or whatever and update the connection string in the xml file, put it back and you're ready to replace your current subsonic.war.

[PiX64]

I tried opening the war with textwrangler, and with the default archive application on my mac, but each time i tried to edit and save it told me that I had to save off the file into a seperate location. Apparently it didn't want me to pop open a war and modify its contents... since i do dev among other things, I just opened it in eclipse changes and rebuilt.

I did not try on windows with winzip er whatever...that may do the trick.

Thanks again!

[hakko]

Not really, sadly. From a technical standpoint, MusicCabinet and Subsonic 4.7b have turned in quite different directions from the common starting point which is 4.6. It would be possible to perform a merge but it's not very straight-forward and I'm not sure if 4.7b is stable enough to build on yet.

What in particular do you want from 4.7?

[jacobthe4th]

Hakko,

I know this question is difficult to answer having been involved in a few Open Source projects myself. I understand the issues of building the mods that become further from the mainline branch. Have you had any discussions with Sindre about bringing the Music Cabinet functionality into his mainline? You've done a lot of really good work here. I know that there are certain aspects (ie. Postgre) that would limit this possibility, but since I inserted your mod, the users of my server (including myself) have been really enjoying the subsonic server, especially the Play Artist Radio portion. Having the possibility for this functionality in the mobile devices would be an incredible feature. It's no stretch to assume those who have used products like Pandora, Last.fm and the like have these same thoughts.

Well, anyway, no real new ideas in this post, just me rambling.

Thanks again for all your work. Until something comes along, I believe I will be content with SS4.6 with Music Cabinet.

[hakko]

Thanks! It's very rewarding to get feedback like that.

The terms of service for the last.fm API which I'm using states that their data is available solely for non-commercial purposes. For that reason, I've removed all ads from Subsonic and the limitations that forces people to donate (sharing, 30 day limit for streaming to mobile devices etc). I haven't asked Sindre and he hasn't asked me, but I'm pretty sure he wouldn't be impressed about that part.

I'd rather hope that more developers would like to get involved now when the MusicCabinet code is there. It's a pretty good platform for adding new interesting functionality actually. And it's available for anyone to play with at github.

Exposing the MusicCabinet functionality through the REST API and adding it to mobile devices wouldn't be that hard, for example. I'd be super happy if another developer took on that.

I also believe that now when everyone's running a Postgres server, a few things can be done more efficiently inside Subsonic. The media file meta data handling would benefit from being taken care of by Postgres, for example. I think the MusicCabinet project will diverge more and more from the official Subsonic. With the help of others, it could become pretty awesome, much better than something built by a single developer.

[hiphutch]

First, Thank you for this awesome plugin! I am excited about this mod. I just installed it and am currently going through the indexing. I have a fairly large collection with around 300,000 songs, so it is taking some time to update.

Subsonic without any mods ran quickly and everything came up fast. I am currently going through the indexing after I have installed MusicCabinet, but have already noticed one issue with this mod. The main display is trying to load thousands of albums with artwork on the main page. This is causing the system to run extremely slow.

I currently have my collection broken down into sub folders by alpha letter before it goes into the artist folders. For example:

M:\music\a\Artist Whos Name Starts With An A\Album\track - song.mp3
M:\music\b\Artist Whos Name Starts With A B\Album\track - song.mp3

so like,

m:\music\q\Queen\News of the World\01 - We Will Rock You.mp3

I have it setup in this manner for a few reasons. Mainly it is far faster to view folders if the system isn't trying to display 20,000 folders at once. Like wise, in subsonic, I don't want it to try to list 20,000+ artists all at once in the left navigation frame. It becomes way to slow and tedious to navigate.

In subsonic without any mods the right navigation frame just has the letters for each folder. I can then click a letter, like the A, and it will show a list on the right with all the artists names that start with A. This makes its load fairly fast. I can then click on the artist name in the main frame and it will show all the albums by that artist.

Currently with MusicCabinet, if I click on a letter like A, it then loads a gigantic list of albums with artwork. It appears to pick some random artist name that is in the A category. Then list every album by every artist whos name starts with an A in the album view along with the artwork sorted by release date. As one can imagine, loading thousands of albums with artwork in one display all in a single page is very time consuming.

Is there any way to fix this so that it behaves more like the default subsonic and allows one to transverse multiple levels of folders?

Thank you.

[hakko]

Hi hiphutch!

The reasoning behind MusicCabinet is to take an initial hit to allow for faster generation of playlists later on. Subsonic doesn't read meta-data of files during the scan (which makes the scanning fast and generation of random playlists quite slow). MusicCabinet reads meta-data for new files (and then caches it), so it'll read through your 300.000 files the first time you use it. It's gonna take a while. Actually, you'll have to run the search index a couple of times to get meta-data for all your artists, there's an upper limit of 4000 artists or so per update to not bail out completely.

For browsing, I've currently made it so that I assume that root folders in your Media folders represent artists.

For your setup, it'll therefore think that you only have artists called A, B, C etc and that they all have enormous amounts of albums. Not quite right. To fix this, go to Settings -> Media folders, remove "music" and instead add A, B, C etc as separate Media folders.

It'll mean 20.000+ artists in your left folder though. Currently, that's how it is. It would be possible to add some folder handling there, but it's nothing I've planned for atm.

Let me know how it behaves after you've done the Media folder change and the search index procedure has finished!

Regards

[mea]

hey hakko,

firstly, thanks for your great work ! i'll try this asap.
secondly, what skin are you using in your demo ?

thansk !

[hakko]

hi mea!

thanks! let me know how it works out, i'm always interested in negative/positive feedback.

the skin is called sonic_white. a friend of mine made the additional icons to go with that theme.

[jacobthe4th]

Good Day Hakko,

I hope you are enjoying the summer solstice. i have one question for you, once a user cleans their folder structure such that the Artist and Album IDs are read properly, how do I get Music Cabinet to re-import the those IDs. I can see in the tables where and why it is struggling (in most cases it is b/c of a subfolder in some of my albums that contians the Artwork, which I thought I had removed most of, but apparently not), but I don't know the most peaceful way of clearing the table entry.

Thanks,

Jacob

[hakko]

Hi Jacob!

What exactly is going wrong?

Currently, it is built so that whenever you update your search index, Subsonic scans your Media Folders and creates a file called subsonic15.index. MusicCabinet then hooks in and parses that file and updates the db tables to keep track of what your library consists of. After doing that, it fetches information from last.fm and stores in the database where appropriate.

If you rename or delete folders within your Media folders, that change should first be reflected in subsonic15.index and then in the Postgres database after doing a search index update (from Settings -> Search). Have you found some bug in that procedure?

The album artwork is then primarily fetched from last.fm. This is because my network at home is super slow and I wanted to ease the burden on it serving artwork. I should make that configurable.. but currently it isn't.

Anyway I'm not really sure what your error is. Could you explain it in more detail, giving a screenshot or a step by step guide or something so that I can reproduce it (or at least grasp it)? Thanks.

[jacobthe4th]

Hakko,

It is not too convenient to connect to the Music Cabinet DB right now, since I am not local to my server. So I will try to explain it as best as my memory serves me.

So, I went to create a Play Artist Radio playlist from the artist "Death Cab For Cutie" and the playlist does not get generated. I also tried to create playlist of the Play Top Tracks, but it was also not possible. I had found a few other artists in my collection where this was happening. Also, I went a similar artist (The Postal Service) and created a Play Artist Radio playlist expecting to see Death Cab For Cutie on, since Last.fm would normally include tracks from them in stations listened to by me previously on Last.FM.

So I decided to see what DB similarities these artists had, perhaps in the Folders of my collection and any of the DB tables in Music Cabinet. Looking through the artists that would not generate either of those playlist, I notice that when they did not have a ArtistID or AlbumID or the entry was wrong (ie. AlbumArtwork was listed as both an AlbumID and an ArtistID). These entries also did not function correctly when generating the playlist(s).

After, seeing that, I looked at the particular Artist directory and Album's folders and saw, very often the contents of one those artist's albums would have an additional sub-directory, containing rip logs, or album artwork. I removed those sub-directories and reran the Index search from SS. I thought this action may allow the IDs to properly defined, but so far they have not. AlbumID and ArtistID are still odd or missing.

I may be able to gather some screen shots later this evening. Until then...

Thanks,

Jacob

[hakko]

Jacob: well spotted! The MusicCabinet import definitely gets additional folders found below the actual album folder wrong during the scanning.

I tried different setups but I couldn't force the "play artist radio" or "play top tracks" to stop functioning, though. What does your folder structure look like exactly for "Death Cab For Cutie"? Do you think you could copy/paste those lines from subsonic15.index?

To be honest, the folder based browsing is a bit annoying. I hope to find time to make it solely based on tags. That would get rid of all these issues.