A few questions about MusicCabinet

[mockingbrd]

I’ve always wanted to try MusicCabinet in addition to the regular Subsonic installation, it looks great. I’ve never pulled the trigger because of the downtime involved (I typically have users listening late at night and early morning) and the fear of screwing up and losing everything.

However, I’ve grown tired of waiting for an update to 4.7 for two reasons. First, the handling of Various Artists releases. All my VA releases are tagged “Various” in the Album Artist field. The fact I can’t see artist by individual track drives myself and my users mad. Also, I hate how playlists function now. In the past I could edit an .m3U in Foobar or my media player of choice, and have it reflected immediately upon load in Subsonic. The fact I now have to edit my playlists from the archaic Subsonic playlist interface, or re-import them every time I make a change, is maddening. I've ceased creating new playlists entirely since 4.7. It seems like a step backwards, really.

I’m pretty sure I saw that MusicCabinet would fix the VA situation, does it affect the way playlists are handled at all? At this point for me, it’s either upgrade to MusicCabinet, or downgrade to a previous version of Subsonic. How difficult is downgrading?

One other question about the last.fm 3,000 artist scan limit. Is there a waiting period between initial scans, or can I do them back to back? I definitely have more than 3,000 artists and wouldn’t want to wait 48 hours or something crazy like that between scans.

[hakko]

You know that you can run multiple Subsonic servers on the same machine? You just have to make sure to use different settings directories (C:\Subsonic is default on Windows, /Library/Application Support/Subsonic on OSX etc) and different ports. Those are all options that are specified in the startup script (if you use the stand-alone installer). That would be the safest way of trying. You might run into something else that MusicCabinet has changed that is important to you and then running a test server before upgrading your real one seems smart.

Various Artists will work just fine as you're using the Album Artist tag. see viewtopic.php?f=11&t=10454

Playlists work as in Subsonic 4.6 in MusicCabinet.

You can do multiple scans back to back, although they also include a scan of your library, so it'll take some time to complete.