Sort by Genre/Artists/Album

[reticent]

I just wanted to +1 this feature. Seems like a pretty basic thing to have given pretty much all current media players function in this way, people traditionally have good tags but bad folder names. Given you've scraped this tag information to generate the search functionality, it seems fairly trivial. Should just be an option, folder view or tag view. As others have mentioned, it's sort of a deal breaker for me, I'll look at other products if it doesn't support this. Please!

[john.jays]

+1 (would be a great feature!)

[markturnip]

Would also like to +1 this.

[r45k]

Would also like to +1 this.

Digging up old posts huh?

I guess I should bump it because I'm sure there is still interest for this feature.

[vancamp]

Of course there's still interest in this... this and the poor layout in landscape (Android client) are the only things keeping me from getting rid of my other music players.

[lars mars]

i can only agree that a genre search option would be extremely helpful. having a collection with about 37.000 albums / 460.000+ songs it would make things sooo much easier to be able to search for sth like doom, ebm, pop etc. instead of being limited to search by artists or albums. since the tags are anyway already in the database (they get listed once you are actually looking into an album) it should be easy enough to actually add a search option for genre.
just my 2cents

greetz, lars

[davidcheok]

BUMP

[smrq]

I can't imagine a more killer feature to have available. I think this is the one feature that Subsonic really obviously lacks compared to other media players.

[jmeb]

I had been wanting this exact feature -- listing by audio tags. I wrote a little work around for Linux/MacOSX called symmusic (https://github.com/jmeb/symmusic) until the developer has the time to implement a nicely-made version. The script generates a new directory structure based on audio tags -- in a reasonably (though not wholly) flexible way. I wrote a little about it here: viewtopic.php?f=8&t=8140 . It is super bare bones and makes two important assumptions about your music collection: 1) it is well tagged 2) it has filetype extensions (.mp3, .flac). People who need something a bit more powerful should check out pytagsfs (http://www.pytagsfs.org).

How resource intensive is this to generate? Not too bad, and only uses enough diskspace for the new directory structure after its made. On my ~100gb music collection I can generate each of the new directories in approximately 1 min on a 3.2 amd x4 (single thread.)

I'm a complete novice to scripting and would appreciate any feedback. Hope others might find this useful.

[jmeb]

Just a note that symmusic (https://github.com/jmeb/symmusic) has gained a few new features which make it useful for solving this problem. Beyond building new directories based on tags (using symbolic links) it also:

(All are optional)
* Restrict formats to sort (mp3, flac or ogg)
* Can remove directories with a less than a given number of songs. This is useful to getting rid of artists appearing only on compilations, useful in a "By Artist" directory.
* Check for and remove broken symbolic links and empty directories.
* Symbolically link any album art (stored as .jpg) from the original directory into the new structure.
* List files for whom a symbolic link was not created.

For now it still requires a POSIX environment (i.e. Linux or Mac OS X.)

[evanrich]

I would REALLY love to see this as well. I use Itunes to first properly arrange my music by folders, as requested, as well as get missing music info. The ability to AT LEAST sort by Genre is absolutely required....what if I want to play all my trance/r&B, rock, etc? no way to do it.

[lars mars]

I would REALLY love to see this as well. I use Itunes to first properly arrange my music by folders, as requested, as well as get missing music info. The ability to AT LEAST sort by Genre is absolutely required....what if I want to play all my trance/r&B, rock, etc? no way to do it.

you can actually do that (kind of) by using the auto playlist option, whats ok - once again, kind of - if you just want to play music of a certain genre in no pre-sorted order. it is completely useless if you try to find stuff in a big collection and just try to narrow your search down. generally the search features (to pinpoint down in big selections to a certain album etc., if you are not sure about artist or album title) are rather stoneage!!!! the given options might have been, in general, acceptable about 10yrs ago. with ever increasing media collections and constantly falling storage media prizes it is just not anymore acceptable. it was easier to shuffle to all my vinyl and cd's 20yrs ago!!!!!
IMHO for any future release that should take the main focus, a UP TO DATE! engine to search the database by ANY and ALL possible means. ok and bug/ glitch updates. most other stuff is fine (in my eyes) at the moment, minor wishes disregarded.

cheers, lm

[chris@heilig.com]

I would love to search by genre. I want to hear all of my holiday music right now, and I don't know how!!

Thanks

Chris

[neutrino15]

I'm a new subsonic user (been using it since last week, can't imagine living without it now) I am deciding between working on this or working on a new theme. Has any progress been made with ID3 indexes so far? I wouldn't want to start a new project if one already exists.

My idea for implementation is as follows:
- Keep the directory structure as the primary view. Do not interfere with any of this functionality, and keep this mode accessible at all times, even when the system is indexing new ID3 tags. This should keep subsonic fast.
- Maintain database of ID3 data for all media, regardless of the directory. Watch file-system for changes and do a daily/weekly scan to fix silly things that crop up. Provide a new tab that offers a more traditional (think iTunes) listing of all tracks with columns of ID3 data (artist, title, album, year, genre, etc...) which you can sort by.
- Add ID3 information to the search database

Not sure how any of this would integrate into the mobile API, but if anything a new set of APIs could be made and mobile developers would just have to implement it separately.

I'll check back at the end of the week. I agree that this is an essential feature and would be happy to help create it.

[guitarlesson]

Right now SS runs on my media server as a "hey look what I can do" novelty to show to my friends, but I don't use it much. I like to listen to my classical music at work, and Google Music has filled the niche due to Genre support.

Regardless of the technical limitations preventing genre support, genre browsing needs to happen. I don't know how to make that happen because I am an end user, not a developer. It's their job to iron out the technicalities, not mine. If the developers can figure this out, it's worth a click on the "donate" link. Until then (I hate to say it) Google Music does what I need it to do.