Subsonic Forum

About a third of the music in my library is not in Album Folders, simply because of the way that I downloaded it or ripped it (NO PIRACY HERE (NOT SARCASM) (NO SRSLY NOT)). I can access all of this music from the left sidebar in the webapp, the folder with all my music in it is the media folder that subsonic is configured to use. However when I use the android app (on an old Huwaei U8180, android 2.2) I can only access music in album folders. This is very frustrating for me, and I am unable to find a cause or solution on the web, despite much Googling and forum trawling. My subsonic server is running on a fairly archaic Dell Dimension 4550, OS Ubuntu Server.

I do hope very much that someone can at the very least give me a reason!

It's just the way the class structure was originally setup in the Android app that would make it a large amount of work to change it to allow songs to be shown in the root structure. I do not know whether Sindre plans on fixing it or not.

It's all about the relationship between structure and speed.

When you are on the local server where all the processing is done locally and retrieved from the hard drive directly, the local hardware can actually cope with poor structure and still deliver reasonable search delivery speed until it reaches the limits of the hardware's processing power. Faster, more powerful CPU, hard drive and ram allocation are all factors, but eventually, enough data will choke even the most powerful hardware if it isn't structured reasonably.

Now consider the Android environment where you're having to consider data search, retrieval and transmission, often under less than ideal connection speeds. In this environment with it's limitations, just throwing everything in root just becomes unwieldy too quickly to be practical, thus, sensible structure is imposed so that the app can deliver usable performance.

The concept is scalable when you read a bit about Hadoop and distributed file systems handling petabytes worth of data that now actually distribute a single file over more than one server to speed retrieval and search. At that scale it's faster to actually retrieve different sectors from different servers in order to get and sort huge quantities of data.

It's all about learning to deal with the right amount of data with the right storage and retrieval strategy to achieve usable performance levels.

It's nothing personal about anyone not wanting to organize their data.

You can always create a folder "not organized" and move all the files in the root into it. If the file numbers are really big, you not only see the files, eventually, but you'll also see how the performance degrades when there are a large number of files in a single directory, rather than smaller numbers of files in more folders.

That's just the nature of the beast.

Ahh Okay! I shall pretend I understood what you posted! I shall endeavour to learn about all this, and to sort out my files! I was planning to eventually categorise them!
Thank you so much for taking your time to explain to me what troubles I was having, so very much appreciated. I think I just about get what you are saying. Aah. Well it's not fun if it all works smoothly huh?

Amen to that.

Lots of trial and even more error.

My suggestion would be to start a new music directory that you want to use with Subsonic.Then gradually copy folders into it in an organized way. That way you'd have the best of the old and new world order.

I always use X:\Music\Artist\Album\tracks

Storage is cheap. Copies don't cost much.

EDIT: Music is easy - you can't believe how long it takes to organize recorded TV. I'm syncing a library right now that's been at it about 12 hours and only looks to be about half done. When you look at moving almost 10 TB over gigabit lan it takes forever.