My thoughts about MusicCabinet

[fonsoy]

Dear hakko & everyone else,

In the last two weeks, I have used MusicCabinet, and I would like to share some thoughts.
My first thought was very positive. It has been a great job on the development of the mod!

The thing that I like & disgust about the standard subsonic, is the file based browsing. This issue is solved in MusicCabinet.
I loved the integration with last.fm. The stories for every artist are very useful, and the 'top tracks' for every artist diminished the need for me, to add a "Best Of" album in some cases.

The #played was removed in the mod. This is something that is intended to be replaced by last.fm, I think. However, sometimes it may be fun to see what among me and my friends have listened to the most.
I have a folder with compilations and soundtracks. I had to disable the indexing of this folder to get rid of the artist 'pollution'. In my case, there were as many artists from the compilations folder, as from the other folders together. This meant, I could not search anymore for these songs. Also, when a user clicks on a song that's not indexed, a null pointer exception is thrown.

About the searching. In standard subsonic it's possible to search for, say, öxxö xööx. Then, searching for oxxo xoox is sufficient.
In MusicCabinet this is different, one must use the exact same characters to find. Sometimes I forget what kind of character 'deviation' is used in an artist name or song.

My findings, unafortunately caused me to swap back to the standard subsonic, despite all the good things MusicCabinet has to offer. That's the reason I will keep MC running on a separate VM to check the frequent (!) updates regularly.

Thank you for reading. I hope that my findings are somewhat useful for the general purpose. Please don't look at this post as a rant, I wanted to write some constructive criticism.

[hakko]

Thanks for sharing!

The #played is associated with last.fm users, so to get it, your users need to set up a last.fm profile. I know everyone isn't happy about this. For me personally, I think it's better as I can listen to a lot of music in another player (iTunes/foobar/etc/etc) and then have my stats imported into Subsonic/MusicCabinet. But that's personal, ideally it would be an option which way to have it.

Compilations and soundtracks need the album artist tag to be displayed properly, see viewtopic.php?f=11&t=10454

I do agree about the searching. I think that I've improved it by the advanced search mechanism, and introducing a search option for recently added/recently played/starred etc, which is not available in standard Subsonic. But I do agree that characters such as à á â etc could be handled as identical.

I don't want to conquer the world with this mod I'm just building the streaming music solution I want for my library, and then I'm sharing it with the rest of the world, hoping that others will find it useful too. But obviously, people have different requirements and one product can't fit everyone.