Music browsing/exploring logic?

[brum]

Hi,

I'm afraid I don't understand how to use the leftside bar to explore/browse my music... . After installation I first stored only a small part of my library as a music folder to see how things go.

It *seems* to me that the default leftside bar lists the names of the folders, although under one, but only under one, folder there's a listing of individual songs. For some reason the stats up are all claiming 0 artist, 0 albums etc.

Is there some import function I haven't found? I did perform a manual search index update, and that worked impressively fast.

How can I switch between exploring by e.g. artist, genre etc?

Sorry if this is covered somewhere in a help/manual, I couldn't find it.

TIA,

Björn

PS. The FAQ that online help points (http://subsonic.sourceforge.net/faq.html) to gives some kind of error.

[brum]

Hi,

OK, the stats updated after a while, and I changed the music directory to include all of my music. And the flac->mp3 transcoding together with last.fm updating works beautifully. Excellent !

Still, I'm somewhat confused as how else to choose music to listen to except for with the file system folder view, and track by track selection. Is it a pre-requisite to have a folder structure with one album per folder? I don't have that, I hoped that one could use metadata as selection criteria, e.g. genre, artist, album etc. And if I get an album as a search result, I don't seem to be able to choose 'Play album', and clicking on the result 'Artist - Ablum title' link fetches that artist's (or folder's?) all tracks.

On the other hand the screenshots of Sindre's own setup show an artist listing in the leftside bar...

Any ideas what I'm doing, or thinking ( ), wrong?

TIA,

brum

[mixmaster]

Yeah, subsonic works off of a directory structure. It assumes \artist\album\song structure, AFAICT. I have a highly organized collection that has both tags and folder structure matching. If you've got a highly organized collection when it comes to tags but not folders, you can use a tool like MediaMonkey to organize it on disk. Just make sure you've got everything backed up as you will misorganize something at some point.

My structure looks like C:\Music\Genre\Artist\Album\## Song.mp3

I make a bunch of music folders in subsonic, one for each C:\Music\Genre location. Then I can browse artists by genre (I choose the dropdown in the left bar for which collection I want and it filters the artists in the left bar to only that genre).
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[brum]

Yeah, subsonic works off of a directory structure. It assumes \artist\album\song structure, AFAICT. I have a highly organized collection that has both tags and folder structure matching. If you've got a highly organized collection when it comes to tags but not folders, you can use a tool like MediaMonkey to organize it on disk. Just make sure you've got everything backed up as you will misorganize something at some point.

Thanks for the verification, Mixmaster!

Unfortunately I don't feel that organising my music this way is feasible, the collection is quite big. I'd end up with far too many folders for my liking, which makes it just difficult to quickly find individual songs from the file system.

From another post I just saw that Sindre is away. Would anybody happen to know why tags are not used for structuring browsing capabilities? I.e., is there some underlying principle or design decision for this?

As far as I understand the songs already indexed for searching, so would not be mostly a question of using this data in the UI?

Rgds,

brum

[mixmaster]

Yeah, subsonic works off of a directory structure. It assumes \artist\album\song structure, AFAICT. I have a highly organized collection that has both tags and folder structure matching. If you've got a highly organized collection when it comes to tags but not folders, you can use a tool like MediaMonkey to organize it on disk. Just make sure you've got everything backed up as you will misorganize something at some point.

Thanks for the verification, Mixmaster!

Unfortunately I don't feel that organising my music this way is feasible, the collection is quite big. I'd end up with far too many folders for my liking, which makes it just difficult to quickly find individual songs from the file system.

From another post I just saw that Sindre is away. Would anybody happen to know why tags are not used for structuring browsing capabilities? I.e., is there some underlying principle or design decision for this?

As far as I understand the songs already indexed for searching, so would not be mostly a question of using this data in the UI?

Rgds,

brum

I don't understand why you think it is easier to find music when it is not organized. I think that once you organize your music it is much easier to find music. Once you organize your music it doesn't matter what a tool uses, folders or tags, you collection will work with it. Trust me, your collection is not too big to be organized, mine is 543 GB and over 105,000 files. IMO, your files and folders should match your tags, at least when it comes to genre, artist, album, track number and song title. The trick is to make a big project of it once, then never add anything into it without updating it to conform to your standards first. I wouldn't consider any collection with a flat file structure to be organized in any kind of way.

I believe that for ease of implementation he just went off the assumption that people would organize the file structure of their music. Indexing doesn't mean that the tags are used, I'm not certain how that was implemented but an index is simply just a premade searching database, it could be built off the files & folders as well, but I'm not sure.
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[brum]

I don't understand why you think it is easier to find music when it is not organized. I think that once you organize your music it is much easier to find music. Once you organize your music it doesn't matter what a tool uses, folders or tags, you collection will work with it. Trust me, your collection is not too big to be organized, mine is 543 GB and over 105,000 files. IMO, your files and folders should match your tags, at least when it comes to genre, artist, album, track number and song title. The trick is to make a big project of it once, then never add anything into it without updating it to conform to your standards first. I wouldn't consider any collection with a flat file structure to be organized in any kind of way.

I believe that for ease of implementation he just went off the assumption that people would organize the file structure of their music. Indexing doesn't mean that the tags are used, I'm not certain how that was implemented but an index is simply just a premade searching database, it could be built off the files & folders as well, but I'm not sure.

Thanks for discussing this, I appreciate it!

Naturally I have the files organised, but not to a Band/Album/Song level. My organisation starts from broad genre (say 'rock', 'dance', 'jazz', 'classical', 'pop', 'black' etc), to a level like /Genre/(Subgenre)/Band, but not album.

What I meant with making a song more difficult to find was that I don't necessarily remember on which album a song was, which means that I'd potentially need to go through all album-folders to find a song. And often I like to find all version of a song at the same time, say original album, remix CDM and a live version. If these would reside in different folders it makes that a tad more complicated.

In practice it looks like this:

Code: Select all

Z:\Rock\Rush\Rush - Animate (Different Stages- Live).mp3
Z:\Rock\Rush\Rush - Animate.flac
Z:\Rock\Rush\Rush - Anthem (Different Stages- Live).mp3
Z:\Rock\Rush\Rush - Anthem.flac
Z:\Rock\Rush\Rush - Armor and Sword.flac
Z:\Rock\Rush\Rush - Available light (Kimastered).flac
Z:\Rock\Rush\Rush - Available Light (Remastered).flac
Z:\Rock\Rush\Rush - Available light.flac


Stats are:

~640 GB
31935 Tracks
3471 Artists
2297 Albums
140 Genres

Thanks to your input I tried to think through my use cases to see if I would have overlooked something, but I still prefer my organisation (level). Of course one doesn't need to operate on the file system level that often, thanks to Squeezebox, Netjuke (my jukebox software of choice so far), and Subsonic, but there still are enough of instances when that is needed.

I'll just hope that Sindre would consider some development in this direction at some stage . Having all track data in a database and referencing tracks from there might also improve on access speed, which was discussed in another thread (related to amount of tracks in folders, caches etc, if I remember right).

Have a good weekend!

Rgds,

brum

[mixmaster]

Most operating systems can do a quick search in the current folder and subfolders. So when I'm not using a media app like Media Monkey, and I'm just browsing for a song but don't know which album it is on I just browse the folder for the artist and then type in a keyword from the song title and the search completes in like a second, maybe two. The added benefit is you can just drag & drop a folder to listen to a whole album. (I still can't give up Winamp for quick playing, but I still run v2.73 from before AOL bought them).

My layout looks like...

T:\Music\Genre\Artist\Album\## Song.mp3

If your tags are already well organized, a tool like Media Monkey can easily setup any type of folder organization you want. Having it organized this way makes it really easy to share an album with a friend if you want. Just drag & drop.

140 Genres?! I don't think I could list 50 genres off the top of my head. I go for very broad genres, in fact I only really have 8. Blues, Classical, Electronica, Hip-Hop, Jazz, Reggae, Rock-Pop and Various (where stuff like Soundtracks, Audiobooks, Comedy, Musicals, Podcasts, etc go). I've avoided fine grained genres like "Alternative" cuz let's face it, Alternative is really pop, which is basically Rock. I don't sort out Classic Rock etc. It's all just Rock-Pop.

The best app is of course one that works both ways. Searching & Browsing on both folders/files and tags. But subsonic appears to be a one man app, for the most part, and so I can totally understand using both to be a feature down the road if ever.

I enjoy digital music org discussion
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[kdid]

You know that you can use the search box in Subsonic to list all versions of a song?

Typing in "Rush Available Light" will give you a list of all places those keywords exists for a song on your collection.

Of course this might not work that well on short artist names / songs that is part of common words.

Maybe Sindre could have made it possible to search more specific that this. E.g. That you could have separate boxes for artist and song name in addition to dropdown lists where you can specify if you want to seek on whole words, string, exact string e.t.c.

[brum]

Mixmaster:

Yes, I see your point with searching from the (e.g.) File Explorer of XP, and quickly beinfg able to drop an album on a player (I use Foobar2000) is an excellent point. Unfortunately XP File Explorer even today doesn't natively support FLAC tags, so it's a drag having a folder with mp3 and FLAC mixed and not being able to quickly sort according to album by using only one column (the Ogg directshow filters enable FLAC tags in File Explorer, but yiu have enable them columns separately).

Regarding genres, yeah 140 is way too much, many of them are currently now erroneous and unnecessary . But the rationale behind having many is that besides listening an album at the time (I'm an LP kind of guy ), I enjoy getting a random mix of a genre. And if my feeling is that I want to listen to "serious" heavy (e.g. Iron Maiden), I don't want to get an interlude of Mötley Crüe "party# heavy.

Ethnic music is one that keeps getting new entries, since I label genre according to country or region. So under Ethnic I have subgenres like Africa, China, Japan, Nordic, Native American, Celtic, Scottish (yes, should probably merge with Celtic), Russian, India, Tibet, Middle East...

Additionally, I enjoy the small educational fringe benefit of learning a music style's own classification through appropriate genres. Classical music I've hence tagged according to Romantic, Modern, Post-Romantic, Contemporary etc. Reggae will have separare entries for Roots, Ska, Rock Steady, Dancehall and Ragga...

I'll do some more thinking about placing albums in their own folders though, we'll see how it feels after some time .

[brum]

You know that you can use the search box in Subsonic to list all versions of a song?

Typing in "Rush Available Light" will give you a list of all places those keywords exists for a song on your collection.

Of course this might not work that well on short artist names / songs that is part of common words.

Maybe Sindre could have made it possible to search more specific that this. E.g. That you could have separate boxes for artist and song name in addition to dropdown lists where you can specify if you want to seek on whole words, string, exact string e.t.c.

Thanks for the input! I've seen and used this feature, and think it works great. This was not, however, my issue because when using some additional software like Subsonic or Netjuke you have these possibilities. My issue was rather with using only XP's File Explorer without other software.

Btw, after getting the search results it would be great to have "shortcut" buttons to play e.g. all of the artist or one particular album. Now one has to manually add any songs from the search result to the playlist.

Rgds,

brum

[mixmaster]

When I do a search I do see the quick links to play, add or download. If it's the album I want I simply click the album name in the search results and then click play all. Seems like this is the best design, adding a "play album" link doesn't really make sense when the search results are a bunch of tracks (not necessarily showing a full album either). It's just one click away though. Adding even more shortcut buttons would make the results page a bit cluttered IMO, especially when it only takes one click from within the search results in order to add the whole album. It takes two for the artist, and it is kind of weird that the "Artist - Album" link is just to the album, I would split them into two separate links, one artist and one album, but 3 shortcuts on the left is already enough.
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[beef_doughnut]

Just throwing in my support for a tag-based browser. My music is plenty organized, but genres aren't part of the hierarchy. When I want a shuffle of a certain genre, I filter only that genre in whatever player I'm using, as they all support tag-based browsing. I'd love to see subsonic get a browser based on tags. I'm afraid that this is sort of a deal breaker for me in an otherwise excellent piece of software.

[mixmaster]

Mixmaster:

Yes, I see your point with searching from the (e.g.) File Explorer of XP, and quickly beinfg able to drop an album on a player (I use Foobar2000) is an excellent point. Unfortunately XP File Explorer even today doesn't natively support FLAC tags, so it's a drag having a folder with mp3 and FLAC mixed and not being able to quickly sort according to album by using only one column (the Ogg directshow filters enable FLAC tags in File Explorer, but yiu have enable them columns separately).

Regarding genres, yeah 140 is way too much, many of them are currently now erroneous and unnecessary . But the rationale behind having many is that besides listening an album at the time (I'm an LP kind of guy ), I enjoy getting a random mix of a genre. And if my feeling is that I want to listen to "serious" heavy (e.g. Iron Maiden), I don't want to get an interlude of M?tley Cr?e "party# heavy.

Ethnic music is one that keeps getting new entries, since I label genre according to country or region. So under Ethnic I have subgenres like Africa, China, Japan, Nordic, Native American, Celtic, Scottish (yes, should probably merge with Celtic), Russian, India, Tibet, Middle East...

Additionally, I enjoy the small educational fringe benefit of learning a music style's own classification through appropriate genres. Classical music I've hence tagged according to Romantic, Modern, Post-Romantic, Contemporary etc. Reggae will have separare entries for Roots, Ska, Rock Steady, Dancehall and Ragga...

I'll do some more thinking about placing albums in their own folders though, we'll see how it feels after some time .

Not sure how I missed this post. for the XP not supporting FLAC tags, I don't see how that is an issue. That would only matter if you were browsing tags, but the entire point is that we are not using the tags to find music but the folder file structure. My approach is to never include multiple copies of an album inside the same folder. I do have several copies of some albums. I name the primary copy normally, and for the other copies I put in extra info in the "album" name (both folders and tags).

So it would look like this ...

C:\Music\Electronica\Amon Tobin\Permutation //primary, probalby your FLAC

C:\Music\Electronica\Amon Tobin\Permutation - mp3 //if the format is different

C:\Music\Electronica\Amon Tobin\Permutation - 128 //if the bitrate is the difference

C:\Music\Electronica\Amon Tobin\Permutation - copy //just a plain old second copy

When it comes to shuffle mixes, my approach has just been to make huge playlists. I call them Radio Station playlists and they include many thousands of songs on them. That's how I handle differences in the moods of the way huge Rock-Pop genre that I've created, etc. For all those ethnic/traditional genres, I do actually tag them as like Bluegrass, Cajun, Soundtrack, Gospel, etc. However, I sort these genres in a folder structure under the Various top level genre (I don't actually have anything tagged as a Various genre).

PS - Not trying to force my organizational style on you, but I have put some serious thought into how I do it and trying to help you alleviate the pains you are experiencing. Take from me what works for you.
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