Folder Names ≠ ID3 Tags

[mockingbrd]

I've spent over 17 years amassing a meticulously-tagged library of digital music. I'm extremely anal about my tags and make sure they’re all correct before adding them to my library. I’ve been using Last.FM as far back as its original inception as “Audioscrobbler” and have always maintained compliant ID3 tags.

I’m equally as anal about my computer’s folder structure, which mimics any modern day music retailer or library, with individual artists placed in alphabetical order using a “Last Name, First Name” naming scheme (or for groups with "the," Beatles, The).

The fact that we now have Last.FM integration with Subsonic is wonderful, but the fact that I have Last.FM telling me my artist names are wrong, based off of my OS folder structure is maddening.

Out of curiosity I ran a check to see how many artist folders this affected. I got a total of 2,673 hits. That's just not a project I'm willing to undertake, even with my Foobar scripts.

Sorry, just had to vent. I’m sure there are others out there like myself. I don’t know if there’s any workaround or ever will be, but it’s rather frustrating, since folder names and ID3 tags are not equals!

/rant. Thanks, still love Subsonic & Dsub and continue to use it on a daily basis.

[frnx]

You're definitely not alone! I've recently discovered Subsonic, and considering a premium subscription since it blows the competition out of the waters. The "folders as albums" is a major pain point for me, as my library is already organized otherwise. While not as big as yours, it would take hours for me to reorganize things properly.

If there's a real workaround I'd love to hear about it. Especially since the ID3 tags appear to be collected anyways.

[jamietre]

MP3Tag (windows app) can automatically reorganize files by folders: http://superuser.com/questions/171052/automatically-sort-music-files-into-folders-by-album-artist-names

It works well enough, you will then end up with a ton of empty folders where the files used to live, there are pretty simple solutions for that too like "RED": http://www.jonasjohn.de/red.htm It's too bad this is necessary.

I agree with you this is a major shortcoming of Subsonic. I recently moved from Squeezebox to Sonos, and frankly the only reason I ended up deciding to get the Sonos stuff (instead of waiting for a better competitor to emerge) is because I could use Subsonic to host my large local music collection. (The Sonos 65k limit thing would have been a dealbreaker, but after much research I found this solution).

It seems strange that there's not just some simple config to have it use some tag-based organization of your choosing when presenting files to Sonos via the API instead of only the file system. In the change logs for Subsonic there are mentions of tag-based indexing, and indeed the Android clients allow sorting by genre and so on, so clearly the infrastructure exists for this. If this feature were present then my life (as far as Sonos is concerned) would be complete.

I am keeping my eye on the Madsonic fork, which is supposedly adding Sonos support and working towards a greatly enhanced 6.0, but there doesn't appear to be too much going on there so I worry it's dead. I am very impressed with Subsonic in many ways, but coming from Logitech Media Server, which was far more configurable, I miss some things, and there doesn't seem to be a lot of new feature development or much activity here on the forum...

That said it's really the only game in town for managing large local music libraries for user with Sonos... since Sonos support is a pretty recent addition, maybe there will be enough people like me buying premium licenses to encourage some more development from @sindre_mehus

[frnx]

I haven't tried MadSonic but it doesn't seem to be very different, and didn't like Ampache much, so I'm sticking with Subsonic despite its shortcomings.

I ended up using http://beets.radbox.org/ since it works on my NAS. I am slowly moving towards reorganizing everything, which is proving to be less painful than I imagined but is still kind of slow. It's still a royal PITA to manage compilation albums properly, but that won't be fixed until Subsonic gets support for ID3 tags instead of folder names...

[jamietre]

Agreed. I haven't checked out beets, will do so.

The real solution is for a music server that's a bit more modern & active (like Plex) to add Sonos support! It's astonishing to me that with the huge number of Plex and Sonos users, nobody's done this yet. The 65K file limit is one of the oldest & most requested features on the Sonos forums. The solution is what Subsonic did: implement the Sonos API. One guy did this. I can't believe that Plex, with their $150/year fee and scads of users, wouldn't get a huge return on doing this. I'd buy a license in a minute.

I mean, I'm glad Subsonic exists, as the only functional way to support an external music server, but it's clearly got a minimum of active development now. I bought a license and was happy to pay the $12 for a year, but I'm not expecting any kind of dramatic updates in the future.

[frnx]

Coming back to mockingbird's issue, now that I have reorganized everything Subsonic is much more pleasant to use. I would recommend Beets, but check the docs very carefully first, some options are not very intuitive unless you read up what they do.

I don't have Sonos stuff -- my neighbors probably wouldn't agree with loud music, but I don't like that Plex has so many closed-source components. I prefer supporting Sindre in making Subsonic better as much as I can. Re: update frequency, I have only been using Subsonic for about a month, so I'm going to wait until I see more!

[jamietre]

I prefer supporting Sindre in making Subsonic better as much as I can.

Me too -- it does 90% of what I want, and the license fee is a steal. But I am just being realistic. He's one guy, and I can't say for sure but I think he's got a day job too If adding better tag handling is on the radar at all, he's pretty tight lipped about it! I just want to use something that is well supported, I can live with shortcomings if I think there's a future in which they might be addressed, but Subsonic's is unclear. I'd love to hear the author chime in about that.

[ItTakesTwo]

Bump.
I recently started using Subsonic as alternative to plex. Especially for audiobooks Subsonic is way better imho. The only problem is that all the albums (= every episode) looks awful because of the not optimized folder structure. If Subsonic could use the ID3 tag instead the problem would be solved.
Any update on this?

[frnx]

Hello ItTakesTwo, welcome!

While I really like all other aspects of Subsonic and still continue to use it, I've come to the conclusion that it is sucks at organizing your audio collection : you will need something else. Like jamietre said earlier, Sindre probably has limited time to work on this.

Re: audiobooks, for example, my current setup would import this quite popular one as :

Code: Select all

/tank/Music/George R.R. Martin/A Game of Thrones/01 - 01 - A Game of Thrones [Part 1].mp3
/tank/Music/George R.R. Martin/A Game of Thrones/01 - 02 - A Game of Thrones [Part 2].mp3
...
/tank/Music/George R.R. Martin/A Game of Thrones/02 - 01 - A Game of Thrones [Part 19].mp3


...which Subsonic would categorize under artist "George R.R Martin" and album "A Game of Thrones" as intended. Beets unfortunately doesn't deal well with extra album content (booklets, that kind of thing) ; I deal with it, nothing's perfect, but you might disagree.

[acroyear]

well, here's the thing: ID3 IS in the system. File ID3 info is scanned and stored (at least, the key fields, same ones you see in the tag editor), and when apps make an API call that uses ID3 (getArtists, getArtist, getSimilarSongs2, search3), the information is ID3 correct and sorted. It even re-merges albums.

E.g., I have my Jefferson Starship Hits album split among an 80s Pop-Rock folder and a 70s AOR. When I go through the UI or in SubFire, the directory-based browsing, they are split.

If in SubFire (my own html5 app), I go to the Artists tab, I see only one "Hits" album, with all the songs from both of them recombined into a single link, in disc-track order as expected/desired.

So the code is there at the DB and API level, it is just that the UI is not using it. Now that the API supports the idea of Music Folder-based constraints on the getArtists API call, it probably would be much easier internally to be able to "flip a switch" and have the Index page render Artist/Album in an ID3 mode, on demand.

Not saying easy, just easier.

In any case, feel free to try SubFire at the link below as your player, assuming you have a premium license, to see if the Artist folder serves your need. I wasn't originally convinced of it when I first added it, but I've gotten used to it. I should have music-folder filtering on it within the next month or two.

[acroyear]

I can't see preserving a deep-folder structure and using ID3 correctly, per the current situation, actually working. The problem is that a folder, or an 'album', doesn't actually have ID3 metadata. Currently Subsonic looks at the folder tree from top-down to determine artist-album, because bottom-up requires a bit of deep searching as well and likely guesswork, especially when you get deeper in cases where people have Artist->Album->CD1,CD2->songs. How deep should one dig to guess that Artist the folder goes with the artist inside that deeper CD1.

[ItTakesTwo]

I deal with it, nothing's perfect, but you might disagree.

I could deal with it as well and adapt my folder structure but this would require work

I can't see preserving a deep-folder structure and using ID3 correctly, per the current situation, actually working. The problem is that a folder, or an 'album', doesn't actually have ID3 metadata. Currently Subsonic looks at the folder tree from top-down to determine artist-album, because bottom-up requires a bit of deep searching as well and likely guesswork, especially when you get deeper in cases where people have Artist->Album->CD1,CD2->songs. How deep should one dig to guess that Artist the folder goes with the artist inside that deeper CD1.

I have to disagree with that. Assuming that sorting songs into albums would take guesswork is simply wrong. If you take a closer look at how Subsonic proceeds when new music is added to a library you will notice that it already digs down to the last level of the provided directory structure to scan every existing song for its ID3 tags. This is required to provide title, artist and embedded cover in the player of your choice. So why not simply scan the album tag per track as well and sort them into these? This way could even sort tracks into albums that are not in the same folders but belong to the same album.

Correct me if I'm wrong.

[acroyear]

Not that. You're missing my description of the problem.

If just rendering artist-album (as I do in Subfire), that sorting is automatic. Again, the API supports it, but I can not say why there's not a Web UI way to view the files this way.

What I'm describing is the issue of providing the right artist/album information from the ID3 when still viewing the files as they are in the file system, when you're not actually in the album folder. If you're in the album folder (meaning a folder with nothing but songs), that's easy. It doesn't matter if you're in The Wall or The Wall->CD1, it can look inside the songs.

Where it is a problem is if you are in The Wall but the songs are all in The Wall->CD1. This is where Subsonic currently assumes that you are in an 'artist' folder because the folder you are in has more folders rather than songs. What would make it assume that this is an album folder instead? How should it interpret The Wall if the folders have their albums "The Wall CD 1" and "The Wall CD 2" in them in their ID3. yeah, broken as far as Last.fm is concerned, but you get my point I hope: it can't presume that The Wall is an album because what is below it isn't consistently tagged. The algorithm of if-then-else's to try to make sense of it is asking quite a lot.

Similarly I have issues where it is wrong because I've added additional filters. I have Rush->Studio->Moving Pictures and Rush->Live->Exit Stage Left (so I can easily shuffle just the studio stuff). In the UI it gives me no artist info in "Studio", and a completely different band in "Live". Well, if it just looks 2 levels down to try to pick an artist out of the albums, maybe it can do that...but then what does it do one level up in Rush? The algorithm for 2-levels-down breaks if instead my hierarchy is "80s AOR->Rush->Moving Pictures", because I don't want "Rush" (or anything else, really) in the 80s AOR folder.

So no, it is not an easy problem to solve at all. It will have to make presumptions, have limits on how far down the hierarchy it 'peeks', and will likely be wrong for some people's setups, no matter what. Whatever is 'best for most' (even you) is going to be wrong for someone else and they'll be up here writing a post about it instead.

Does it mean a better ID3-based deep-peek algorithm can't be devised? Of course not, just that it won't be flawless, nor easy.

[acroyear]

In thinking about it, I think the issue and a possible solution is *distinctiveness*.

Based on all of the files below me no matter how deep, how many *unique* artists do I have. If the answer is '1', then that is the artist for this folder (in API terms, "Music Directory") and is what should be rendered. If the answer is more than 1, then there is no artist for this folder, it is a meta-folder for sorting, and shouldn't be making a Last.FM association. That would solve the AOR->Rush and Rush->Live->... possibilities together. "Live" would be Rush because every file below it has Rush for its artist.

If the user has indistinct artist names ("Hall and Oats" vs "Hall & Oats", or in my case Last.FM griped when I had "Alan Parsons Project" instead of "The Allan Parsons Project"), they'll still need to do some clean up, but in most cases it should handle the situation.

Joe

[ItTakesTwo]

Okay now I get how you meant it in the first place.
Well that is an interesting method to sort your library but I guess it's the programmers preference.
Your solution could fit my needs even if it's - from my point of view - a workaround the real problem.