Subsonic Forum

Hello,

I am brand new to Subsonic and still finding the best way to use and configure it.

Navigating my music library is extremely dependent on genres. So far it seems to me like the default browsing for most subsonic interface starts with artists.

Is there an app or interface that is good for browsing first by genres (ideally genre>artist>album>song)? Or is there a particularly smart way to set up or use any of the apps or interfaces with that in mind. I am using a Mac (10.10.5) and sometimes an Android phone (6.0).

Your experienced advice would be greatly appreciated.

- ZT
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Problem Description: See above
Troubleshooting Steps: I've tried the latest versions Submarine, SubAir, and Jamstash. None of them appear to have browsing by genre ability.
Subsonic Version: 6.0 (build a7857c) – April 30, 2016
Server Version: jetty-6.1.x, java 1.8.0_25, Mac OS X (111.1 MB / 133.5 MB)
Hardware Platform: Mac (10.10.5) and sometimes an Android phone (6.0)

You could go the route of having each genre be its own top-level Music Folder, so instead of one folder "Music" with everything below it, you can have your Celtic, Classical, Soundtracks, Metal, etc each be their own top-level, then use the music-folder filtering to keep things focused. That's if that's how your folders are organized.

I haven't added Genre-first support to SubFire yet, 'cause it isn't really something I'd use. I have the folders organized by a general genre (and classical and soundtracks served up by a second server, where i can sort albums within artist folders by name instead of date). The actual genre tags in my files are a mess, between early experiments at trying multi-genre when iTunes was my main music player, and then the mess of genres one gets when you purchase files from amazon or iTunes stores.

The API only supports getting songs by genre. To produce an album list, one has to try to fetch ALL of the songs by genre, group them together by album, and then fetch the album info. The web player does this very quickly since it is served up by the database (maybe it does that internally in a call), but for a 3rd party app using the published API, that is a very slow process, made worse if the client can't cache the results.

Thanks for the reply. That is a clever way to do it with Subfire, which I had not used before.

I'll keep playing with this and any other suggestions I find for browsing by genre>artist>album>song.

Thanks!