First off, I'm a long-time Linux geek but new to Subsonic, having just discovered it after years struggling with all sorts of different web-based media jukeboxes including Andromeda, kPlaylist, Zina and MPD to name a few. Subsonic is by far the most mature, feature-full product I have ever encountered -- I can't believe it took me this long to come across it. Many kudos to the developer(s) on a well-written piece of code.
My 2TB music collection is organized by artist name in top-level directories named A through Z in the format /music/A/Artist/Album/Song. For artists whose names begin with a number (e.g, 10,000 Maniacs), there is a directory named "/music/0-9".
I've installed version 4.7 Beta 2 a couple of days ago, and after reading carefully the online documentation, I decided to add each alphabet letter top-level directory as individual "media folders" so as to get the navigation effect that best fits my needs. With that, I would like to point out a few things I've noticed, namely:
(1) The media folder scan was able to scan all my folders (letters A-Z) seamlessly, but would NOT pick up the media folder "/music/0-9". After a lot of trial and error, I disabled all media folders except 0-9, where I was able to pinpoint that the scan would simple give up with the following log entries:
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[2012-07-14 13:04:24,008] INFO MediaScannerService - Starting to scan media library.
[2012-07-14 13:04:43,880] INFO MediaScannerService - Scanned media library with 1 entries.
Finally, I thought I'd rename the directory 0-9 to a simpler string such as 'test'. Re-running the scan on the newly renamed directory "/music/test" worked as expected:
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[2012-07-14 13:05:50,791] INFO MediaScannerService - Starting to scan media library.
[2012-07-14 13:06:10,187] INFO MediaScannerService - Scanned media library with 1 entries.
[2012-07-14 13:08:26,978] INFO MediaScannerService - Automatic media scanning disabled.
[2012-07-14 13:08:32,715] INFO MediaScannerService - Starting to scan media library.
[2012-07-14 13:08:51,801] INFO MediaScannerService - Scanned media library with 250 entries.
[2012-07-14 13:09:08,724] INFO MediaScannerService - Scanned media library with 500 entries.
[2012-07-14 13:09:25,663] INFO MediaScannerService - Scanned media library with 750 entries.
[2012-07-14 13:09:42,009] INFO MediaScannerService - Scanned media library with 1000 entries.
[2012-07-14 13:09:57,137] INFO MediaScannerService - Scanned media library with 1250 entries.
I would classify this as a bug, but defer it to the community to make that determination.
(2) After having dealt with issue described above for a few hours, I would suggest that a "debug" or "verbose loggging" checkbox option be added to Settings, whereby every file Subsonic comes across during the scan would be logged for success or failure. This would make it possible to verifiably discern that the scan did or did not succeeded as intended on a particular media folder.
(3) While still in the topic of media folders, I would also suggest a feature that would allow manual scans on a per-media folder basis. This would allow for the addition of new media folders without having to re-scan all the folders already in place, and would greatly aid in troubleshooting issues such as the above on a collection of well above 200,000 songs.
(4) Finally, I purchased iSub from the Apple store in order to use an iPad to control the music being played on the server remotely. I love the setup, but was disappointed in the inability for the app to control the volume remotely on the server. When inquiring about this feature with the iSub developers, I was told this is a limitation on Subsonic server, whereby each user is generated a separate "Jukebox" player instead of a single, central server player that is shared among all users. Is this information correct, and if so, are there any plans to implement the ability for a Subsonic client to control the volume on the server?
Thanks for letting me voice my opinions and suggestions, and my apologies in advance for the lengthy post.
Cheers,
Drew