The music folder list in the left sidebar

[tanuki]

Hi Subsonic users,

I have a couple of samba shares mounted in a kind of "top directory" which holds all my music; /var/opt/storage/music. For testing purposes I have only one share mounted in there, called "music_1".

As it looks right now the left sidebar is only showing the mount name, "music_1". If I click it I get to see the contents of that directory in the main view, where I can click deeper into the tree structure and choose an album to play.

Is there a way to get a list of all the indexed artists on the left sidebar, so that I can click an artist name and get all the albums found for that name in the main view?

Regards,
tanuki

[jigsaw]

Hi tanuki

The left sidebar shows the folders in the manner they are structured on your drive. This gives you a real-time view of your music folders regardless of whether the search-index has been updated and so forth. Altering this functionality, given you could get a more customizable left-bar, would also force you to always refresh the search-index whenever something is added, moved or deleted. Personally I love the fact that everything is right there in the left-bar instantly.

To achieve what you ask you could restructure your music in folders such as this:

-root-folder
-- artist a
---album 1
---album 2
-- artist b
---album 1
...
and so forth.

I've read a bit about different tools other users of subsonic are using to automatically re-structure their music-folders based on the mp3-tags and such. Not sure which right now though, but search and I'm sure you'll find

PS: To exclude any folders from showing you just create a file in the root-folder named "subsonic_exclude.txt" and list the ones to exclude, one per line.

[JBDive]

I'm in the process of moving all my music and including it in Windows 7 Libraries and so forth and I'm not happy with the resulting look in Subsonic of this Index list on the left either.

I prefer to have my music folder structure setup as:

Decade
->Artist
-->Album

What happens by doing this though with Subsonic is all I get on the left is my decade list, 2K, 90s, 80s, etc. I'm thinking what others are looking for as well as myself is that list being more dynamic and representing all the Artist folders from the Root down not just what it sees in the Root.

As I sync with an MP3 player and I may not know every artist I like from 1977 I can find that music quicker by starting off with a master folder of the decade or in the case of the music for my kids it's all in "Childrens", my Bluegrass under Bluegrass and not mixed in a massive single Root directory. With some 2,300 artist (per subsonic) if they were all in the root I would never be able to sort them.

[mixmaster]

JBDive, you can already do what you want.. I use genres instead of years as my root folders, but the concept is the same. When setting up your music folders, add each of your "decade" folders instead of adding the "Music" folder. Then you can use the dropdown in the left frame to sort and it's exactly what you want.

So let's say your folders look like

Music\70s\Artist\Album
Music\80s\Artist\Album
Music\90s\Artist\Album
Music\00s\Artist\Album

When configuring your music folders don't add Music. Add the 70s, 80s, 90s etc as the folders and then you can show all your artists in the left frame or just the artists from the 70s.
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