Hierarchical view for subsonic Android app?

[hapx]

Hello,

One of my music folder structure is:
d:\somepath\mymusic1\
d:\somepath\mymusic1\dir0001
d:\somepath\mymusic1\dir0002
...
d:\somepath\mymusic1\dir9999

The Web subsonic access is OK, on the left column it shows different directories dir0001... to dir9999.
This allows easy access. But the Android application shows all the dir0001 to dir9999 content in a single display.
This takes very long time to display and hang most of the time (especially if I have ten of such directory structure
with more than 50,000 mp3 files). The connection failed after 4 retries and also the CPU in the PC is 100% all the time.
This is an important bug that prevents me from using subsonic correctly.

Suggestion:
Is it possible on the Android app to show only first level directories when press on the music note icon (2nd icon at bottom), like:

d:\somepath\mymusic1\
d:\somepath\mymusic2\
d:\somepath\mymusic3\
etc...
Then subsequent press on mymusic1 will show subdirectories content under mymusic1 etc... with Back key to go up to parent
directory etc...? This would be much more friendly and easier to handle my large collection of music.

Thank you for your support.

[kermit22]

You will have to set up each directory (D:\somepath\mymusic1, d:\somepath\mymusic2,...) as its own music folder share in the web interface settings. I had to do the same thing with my music because I was getting timeouts also.

[hapx]

Thank you for your suggestion, but this is not possible since I have as I said a lot of sub-directories (about 2000), and I cannot manually add them as individual folders. Also by doing this, each time I have a new sub-directory I have to readd it.

Hope that developer would have a solution. By comparison, gmote is much easier to use since it presents the top hierarchy first.

[kermit22]

You don't have to add all 2000 directories under each top level folder. Just add the top level folders. The mymusic1, mymusic2, etc. The app will then show the top level folders like you want.

How many top level folders do you have?

[hapx]

Thank you for your interest in my problem.

I have less than 10 top level folders. They are all enabled.
I have no problem (performance, ease of access) with the Web application, thanks to the combo-box
allowing to select each of these folders separately or "All" folders.

But with the Android subsonic application, with the same configuration of 10 top level folders, as soon as
I click on the second button at bottom (music note), then the CPU in the PC goes to 100% and lot of disk access.
Even if I cancel the request or stop the Android application, the background process (subsonic-service) still
monopolizes the CPU for a while (about 15 minutes).

It appears that it tries to send back all the contents of all the 10 top level folders, which is bad (more than 50,000 mp3). What I need is that it instantly
shows me only 10 lines corresponding to 10 top level folders. Then when I enter a selected folder, it can then
scan all the subfolders of it and present them to me (without needing to scan each sub-directory content). Only when I enter again inside the sub-folder then it should display the mp3 inside it. It should looks like as normal directory browse level by level under Windows. This is the way the Web application works.
By the way I only have one level depth, for example
d:\somepath\music1\myalbum0001 is the deepest level.

This is why subsonic Android app is not useable for me .

By the way, the log file c:\subsonic\subsonic.log is very big (40 MB+) and is filled with entries like:
[2011-07-07 17:19:40,287] WARN JaudiotaggerParser - Error when parsing tags in r:\Multimedia\Music\XXX\yyy.mp3
org.jaudiotagger.audio.exceptions.InvalidAudioFrameException: No audio header found within yyy.mp3

while these mp3 are absolutely OK and well tagged.

[hapx]

Other problem:
If my top level folder contains only songs (mp3), no sub-directories, then Subsonic Android app does not show these songs, just an empty list! There is no problem with the Web application though.

[GJ51]

I've got almost 40,000 songs in my library organized by X:\Music\Artist\Album\Tracks

Loads in a jiffy. Easy to use and find what I'm looking for.

Never ceases to amaze me; all these exotic library schemes ...

As always results can be observed at the link on the bottom.

Cheers

[vancamp]

Although you have a nice large library, it seems to map reasonably to a hierarchy without genres. I add a "genre" folder between the "music" and "artist", since my library has quite a bit of very different music (with different artist naming schemes). It includes: Ambient, Bluegrass, Celtic, Classical, Folk, International, Jazz, Medieval, New Age, Opera, Pop, Soundtrack, and Spoken. Although it usually loads quickly enough, the lack of navigation through ID3 tags is very annoying.

[hapx]

@GJ51

Thank you for your collection. But I see that there is same problem: no individual songs displayed if they are under the main folder. It looks like that under the main folder should only be other sub-folders for the Subsonic Android app to work.

[GJ51]

Yes, that it correct. Whatever the defined path is to "Music Folders" should only contain folders.

e.g:

If you define D:\Music in settings then the music contained ideally would be D:\Music\Artist\Album\Tracks

You could add a layer of sophistication by defining more folders in settings, such as

D:\Classical
D:\Rock
D:\Country

etc.

This would be a good setup for a drive devoted to music. Othewise, you could still use

D:\Music\Genre\Artist\Album\tracks

I'm not in any position to comment on wether or not this is a great setup for everybody, but it is what works best with Subsonic. Any tracks dumped into the root of a defined folder will not appear in the mobile app.

The drop down selector makes it easy to segregate your choices when you use multiple defined folders. I enjoy music, but I'm not fanatical about my collection (yet) as SS does everything I need it to for now, but it is nice for seperating the music from the video. The other folders on my site just sort of evolved while troubleshooting and testing transcoding settings and testing network shares.

[zoydberg]

I'm sure others have figured this out by now, but you can fix this issue without having to rename/restructure any files or folders. To fix this, go to the SS settings>Music Folders, on the folders your having issues with, change the location to the immediate parent folder.

For me I was having issues with my movies not showing on Android but would show just fine on the web, originally I had it set to /media/lem/video/Movies, I just changed it to /media/lem/video. It makes me browse through one extra folder on the clients, but now I can at least see all my media on the Android client.

[SemperFratres]

I'm sure others have figured this out by now, but you can fix this issue without having to rename/restructure any files or folders. To fix this, go to the SS settings>Music Folders, on the folders your having issues with, change the location to the immediate parent folder.

For me I was having issues with my movies not showing on Android but would show just fine on the web, originally I had it set to /media/lem/video/Movies, I just changed it to /media/lem/video. It makes me browse through one extra folder on the clients, but now I can at least see all my media on the Android client.

I was having this issue. Thanks for supplying the answer for me.