MusicCabinet vs. Subsonic 5.1

[jacobthe4th]

I posted this, deeper in the Mods section of the this forum, but feel like it may not be found there, so here it goes, here in General. I've been using MusicCabinet since it's inception, and like many users I've come to love it's ability to generate playlists of the Artist's Top Tracks and more importantly the Artist Radio. Have any of you gone back to the Mainline Subsonic, now that Sindre added the "Artist Radio" feature?

1.) If so, have you noticed anything that you miss for MusicCabinet?

2.) Has the mainline's search been improved?

Thanks,

Jacob

[KicknGuitar]

MusicCab was the shit, no?

For me, I found some small bugs that started to annoy me so I moved to try Madsonic which had the radio feature and a ton of others. However the major function I miss from leaving MusicCab is sorting by tags. Neither vanilla Subsonic nor Madsonic offer an option to organize the library by tags. I haven't heard anything about Subsonic adding this, but the recentsneak peak for Madsonic's update showed the option to sort by tags so I may settle there.

That's really my only complaint about non-MusicCab Subsonics. I never had issues with the search so I guess I can't talk about that.

[rubbersoul]

MusicCab was the shit, no?

For me, I found some small bugs that started to annoy me so I moved to try Madsonic which had the radio feature and a ton of others. However the major function I miss from leaving MusicCab is sorting by tags. Neither vanilla Subsonic nor Madsonic offer an option to organize the library by tags. I haven't heard anything about Subsonic adding this, but the recentsneak peak for Madsonic's update showed the option to sort by tags so I may settle there.

That's really my only complaint about non-MusicCab Subsonics. I never had issues with the search so I guess I can't talk about that.

Just a suggestion: If your music is well tagged, then it is truly trivial to organize your music folder tree based on those tags in an automated fashion using any number of tagging software available on any platform. Is there something holding you back from doing this?

Actually vanilla subsonic does "sort by tags" but I think you need to have music sorted well by folder first in order for that to work properly. I know this because I have some artists whose names have characters not allowed as folder names but they are stored properly in vanilla subsonic v5.1. It has been this way for a long time. IMO there is no excuse to have unorganized music if you have good tags

[KicknGuitar]

The files are tagged properly – Only the folders are fucked up thus Subsonic won't list appropriate artist names. MusicCab was the only version which could ignore folder structure if desired. A "feature" I've seen as key since using Subsonic.

I don't know of any automating tag/folder software, care to share their names?

[rubbersoul]

I use foobar2000 which is a media software akin to iTunes but significantly more powerful and customizable. you can simply run as a portable software if you don't want to install anything (be sure to include all the optional add-on plugins during "installation").

drag your music folder into foobar2000 window
select all files
right click > file operations > move to > ...

this will give you the following window:


from here you can customize the movement using your metadata tags. note, that any mistagged stuff will get moved incorrectly obviously but if your tags are good the movement will perfect. I highly suggest you do this on some trial files to make sure the output is as you want before doing this on your entire library. you can even use the "copy to" method when doing the trial runs to be sure nothing gets messed up. when you're confident, then run this on your library and magically everything will be perfectly organized to your current metadata. updated metadata? just rerun the script and things will be moved accordingly!

hope this helps, but if you need more direction let me know.

EDIT: actually I just realized you may want to simply create a new organized directory and instead of actually moving/renaming the files you can simply create links with foobar. This creates pointers to the file so it looks like there is a copy, but really it is just a shortcut to the files that look like a copy organized by tags. this way nothing actually moves so everything is reversible. if you like it, you can then do the permanent movement.

[mea]

Come on! Subsonic should use the tags instead of the folder names...It makes more sense.
Because of this, subsonic do not list a single artist description nor "group" the albums by artist name

Plex is doing the job pretty well...

But I have then two issues :

1. flex definitely can't handle big collections
2. the plea client app do not put in "cache" anything. By this I mean that, when you want to list your "big" album its, it takes long minutes to show up, and that, every time you restart the app ! terrible...

If subsonic could act (tags) , and look like (design) plex, it would be heaven.

[ebasta]

I loved that musiccabinet would group artists by the artist tag and not only the album artists tag. For instance, take Rumours by Fleetwood mac tagged as such:

album - track# - title - artist - album artist

Rumours - 1 - Second Hand News - Lindsey Buckingham - Fleetwood Mac
Rumours - 2 - Dreams - Stevie Nicks - Fleetwood Mac
Rumours - 3 - Never Going Back Again - Lindsey Buckingham - Fleetwood Mac
Rumours - 4 - Don't Stop - Christine McVie - Fleetwood Mac
Rumours - 5 - Go Your Own Way - Lindsey Buckingham - Fleetwood Mac
..etc

When selecting the Artist Lindsey Buckingham, the result would return Second Hand News, Never Going Back Again, and Go Your Own Way, but not Dreams or Don't Stop. Selecting Fleetwood Mac as the artist, you would get all the tracks.

And neither the native subsonic nor musiccabinet would allow you to browse by album list!

[Boutros]

MusicCabinet remains, as KicknGuitar said, the shit. It's not dead, people! It's only resting!

But it occurs to me that I must have a real perverse streak, as I remain utterly devoted to two apps that (MusicCabinet and iSub) that are no longer being developed. Where I am, it's always 2013, and everything sounds great