Sort by Genre/Artists/Album

[menno]

I just donated 10 euro, but i need to see the ID3 tag feature coming.
That is by farrrrrrrrrrrr the biggest drawback of this software.

I only play music by genre since my collection is that big.
I am in the mood for genres not for partiucular artists.

I am keen to see this feature implemented.

Menno

[DroidGnome]

This too was the only reason I haven't sold myself on this app yet..

I use XBMC for my media collection and already went through and retagged everything. My collection however is rather large (approx 600+ CDs worth), and while I'd love to use folder structures, it simply doesn't work for anyone with a serious music interest.

I have artists who change genres from album to album, hell on a song by song basis sometimes. I've tagged my music in such a way to easily find by artist, by song genre and such... folders are a 1-1 ratio only, and that simply doesn't work for many of us.

If only I could get the Subsonic media server to read my XBMC database hmmmm

[randy21m]

I'm sorry, but I disagree with all of you "needing" to have the ID3 tags as a functionality for basis. I have well over 200+GB of music. I sat down and spent to time to ID3 tag everything, as well as restructure my folder structure to match that of how I viewed it in my media player (mediamonkey). By doing that, I tell subsonic to monitor my directory Z:\Music, and then underneath music is my layout of Genre, and then underneath that, each artist. So now when I view Subsonic in the WebUI, what I have listed is all my Genres on the left. I click one, then in the middle becomes the artists and so forth and so forth. I don't see how this couldn't be what you are desiring. I do see the missing the year part, I do miss that, but something I can easily live without. One thing I personally miss, is I rate all of music in mediamonkey, and SS does not recognize that As far as those talking about artists with different Genre's, well that's simple too. Use a tool like MM to list the different genre's, then have MM auto organize into a structured folder set, though this would throw your collection off if you like to keep your albums together. My main point is, set your folder structure, it's not that hard, and it make SS 100x better.

[bburroughs]

Reorganizing directories might work in some situations, but I've got a couple issues with it:
1. Much of my collection is tagged with multiple genres.
2. I don't always want to search by genre. Often I want to do a straight artist search without going through a genre structure.
I realize that it will be a lot of work, but what I'd like to see someday is a flexible structure like the Squeezebox server that I typically use at home: it scans your entire collection, and you can then browse that collection by sort artist (so that "David Bowie" shows up under "B", not "D"), genre, year, or just about any other tag.
Having said that, I absolutely love Subsonic as it is, and get far more than my money's worth out of my meager donation.

[DroidGnome]

I'm sorry, but I disagree with all of you "needing" to have the ID3 tags as a functionality for basis.

Feel free to disagree, tis why this is in the 'request' section and not a "Thou shall code thine app like this" section.

As for reorganizing.. I don't have nearly 200Gigs, but then again size is relative to how you rip them. I can tell you that I have 12,670 Files, 936 Folders in my music folder and another 5,752 Files, 320 Folders in my AudioBook folder.

Within my music folder the folder structure is organized currently into a few subfolders.. "Own the Disc", "Amazon Purchases", "Itunes Purchases", and "Other".

Within each of those are the standard Artist/Album structure.

While subsonic does work, I get up to 4 folders of Aerosmith for example instead of 1.

Could I combine it all? Sure... but should I ever have another HD corruption and lose my music it'll be that much harder to restore it. (That was the basis for the structure in the first place).

And as far as breaking up albums.. no way. I struggled with myself a long time before I even broke up the artist, but it was a pain to figure out where/how to restore my music when I lost it all a few years ago. (Of course now I have 2 HD's raided, so odds are good it'll never happen again).

Bottom line, is I shouldn't have to reorganize my music so that ONE application can read it properly. I have several apps that read my music and they all work off Tag caching, no reason Subsonic couldn't do the same. (Beyond the "it's not currently coded that way" issue of course).

Lastly, again this was just a feature request someone made, and quite a lot of us would like to see it implemented, which is why we're replying on the post. It's not meant to turn into a 'you should do this to your collection' discussion.

[vancamp]

I have ~200GB of music, with both well-tagged and well-sorted folders. If it were just a matter of getting the files moved into the right places, an automatic solution to reorganize would be possible. However, the use of multi-genre artists, and multi-artist albums leaves no good way to navigate the Genre->Artist->Album path in all cases. I would very much like to navigate by tags, especially to find some interesting song/track lurking hidden in someone else's album. (and I'm unwilling to break up albums)

Of course, it would be best to make it configurable, so those who like the current approach could keep using it.

Finally, I would even like to multi-tag (using a specified separator, like ";"), so that you could place the same music in multiple genres, for instance. All of these capabilities are already in slimserver.

[ballroomsalsadancer]

In terms of a feature that would make me want to pay money for this and recomend that my friends buy it too, I need to be able sort or select by genre. The app that lets me do that vs. requiring me to do it on my own by directory structor, is the app that gets my dollars.

[pr1nc1p3]

+10000

[insan3]

I just donated 10 bucks, because i love it . Anyway, if this feature get implemented i will donate another 20. .

I have quite an organized folder structure but sorting on artist/album would be very nice. it is the only reason why I still use winamp on my desktop, otherwise i would the subair app.

I can image that it would not be great for the performance but maybe you can make it as a optional feature. With long intervals, lets say once a day, or just manual only. Me, and a lot of other users would be very very happy

[agentblueuk]

What is interesting is how quiet the author has been here.

As already mentioned, the meta data is already there as it is displayed in the main body of the page. The API is pretty useless when it returns rubbish like

<artist name="The Best of Groove Armada"

This is clearly not an artist, but simply every folder is called an "artist" which is total joke. I can fully appreciate that subsonic wishes to index by folder, the first music app i wrote also worked on a similar way.

While I do see that users can organise their collection purely based on file system, there is also a very good reason why many users swapped from dragging and dropping from file browser into winamp/xmms was because they wanted a proper music database.

Subsonic is great and could be so much better if this option could be added to the API and to the web gui to allow people to browse by metadata if they wish

[agentblueuk]

p.s

The "overhead" of indexing is only during the index and you could reduce the need for this to fire once an hour if you used http://jnotify.sourceforge.net/ once the app started

[fukid]

+1 for genres and ID3 tags.

[un_dave]

I'm yet another user who loves subsonic and I just signed up to add another +1 to this thread...

I have a large library which I have carefully tagged and maintained over the past years, and over this time I have only paid passing attention to the folder structure, as pretty much all other library tools out there allow you to refer to tags as the main source of information. Now I have a few different applications (such as iTunes, etc) each pointing at the same library, and each with their own playlists setup for their own purposes.

Point is, if I "clean-up" my folder structure now, I lose a multitude of great old playlists and it messes up all my other music tools. And in the end, is that really a good solution anyway? As we all know, a simple hierarchical file system structure is never going to be the best way to represent and organise even the most moderate of music libraries.

This is really the only complaint that I have about subsonic, and while I imagine adding this functionality might require a large investment of time and effort, maybe a bounty or donation pool could be setup to support this development? I know I'd be happy to invest in it!

I don't expect my current donation to pay for future development, and I'd be happy if it just bought the developer a few beers. Just to say thanks.

Keep up the great work, and I look forward to the future developments!

[nguillen]

I hear what people are saying about technical reasons why the feature isn't there now, how it would be difficult to implement, and how there are workarounds (i.e. folder organization) that let you partially achieve the stated goal.

That said, the feature request still stands: it would be awesome to be able to browse by genre/artist/album in addition to artist/album.

I'll leave it up to the developers to figure out the best way to implement it.

[lunged]

nguillen said it well. This functionality is needed to be taken seriously as an all purpose music player/database.

Keep up the good work, I just hope it isn't *too* long before this can be implemented.