Subsonic Forum

Subsonic is nearly perfect for my use and enjoyment, which is immense, and I silently thank you for it every single day. Yet how I wish I could clean up my collection as I listen. Please make a Delete Song / Delete Folder feature! Please please please!

You do realise that such a feature could give a hacker the possibility to totally destroy your entire media-collection?
Allthough I have several back-ups of my collection I wouldn't want to wake up one morning to discover that I had to restore 1.2 TB.
Also Subsonic was imho never intended this way.

Well, a hacker could now go into your system and retag all of your MP3s. I still would like this feature, and of course one could turn it off if they wanted.

toolman wrote:You do realise that such a feature could give a hacker the possibility to totally destroy your entire media-collection?
Allthough I have several back-ups of my collection I wouldn't want to wake up one morning to discover that I had to restore 1.2 TB.
Also Subsonic was imho never intended this way.

Retagging the files would cause minimal damage, because no hacker would be able to mess up my collection without working for days since I have 147,967 songs in my collection.
Any setting that you can turn off can be turned on again by a hacker.
If this feature would actually be implemented a lot af Subsonic users would abondon the software.

Entirely disagree, but so be it.

toolman wrote:Retagging the files would cause minimal damage, because no hacker would be able to mess up my collection without working for days since I have 147,967 songs in my collection.
Any setting that you can turn off can be turned on again by a hacker.
If this feature would actually be implemented a lot af Subsonic users would abondon the software.

Here's the kicker: there's no API for changing files' ID3 tags. They would have to be done one at a time, or one folder at a time (if the crack involved replicating the form entry of the tags editor page). Updating the ID3s is also slow, and interactive, until the hacking code figures out how to iterate through folders.

By contrast, any file/folder delete feature usually includes a deep delete. ONE call, at a top level, would be sufficient to do a lot of permanent damage.

I like the separation of concerns: I handle my file system and my files, Subsonic handles serving them in the state they are in.

Yep, well for those of you running Subsonic on your computer, or even just locally, I can imagine feeling this way. But in other situations, where you run it on a remote server with a ginormous collection that you like to refine as you listen to it, it makes sense. I don't want to have to delete songs/albums via FTP or SSH. That's why it should be a setting for admins only and can be turned off at the server level, if you don't want Subsonic to have that power. I, for one, do. And I bet there are others. I, for one, could give not a single sh!t for the Sonos features, because I don't own or use Sonos. But that's just me. I think this would be an incredibly useful feature.

Well, you don'tlike the Sonos feature and a lot of us don't like your idea.
But in the end it all comes down to what Sindre has in mind for Subsonic.
I just hope this deleting files feature will never be implemented, because than I would switch without any hesitation to Madsonic or another alternative.

There are currently huge holes in Subsonic that would be fairly trivial to hack. Subsonic is years out of data in it's Spring framework so it would be trivial to hack any Subsonic server. I absolutely don't want to give such a hole-ridden service more power to mess with the underlying file system. What you are saying makes prefect says about it being a completely useful API to have, but adding something like that also completely ignores the reality of the extremely lacking security in Subsonic.