Subsonic 4.7.beta2 released

[quickmic]

I have a serious Problem: my hole Video-Directory is not displayed anymore. Is this a bug? Even after a full scan including a restart afterwards none of my video-files is displayed.

exactly same here

edit: seems to be solved after complete rescan




...And is it possible to build in an audio-track selection (language)?

[gigon]

I have installed this beta release and for the most part I like what I see. While I like the feature of albums be sorted by artist and release date, it doesn't work for a large collection of various artists. Is there a way that I can sort this folder alphabetically?

Same problem here. Browsing becomes a real challenge to me.

[GJ51]

I must admit that I may not be the average user, but I frequently see these posts about sorting, organizing, and finding music in Subsonic and I never can understand the problem. I have Time Life music, Billboard top 100, CM Top 100, and other various artists collections. Whenever I search for a given artist they are returned from any collection in the libarary and are easy to find.

What am I missing?

Users used to complain about SS not using the tags to sort the library, so Sindre did that in the 4.7 b1 and there were tons of complaints that SS no longer used the folder names so he went back to that for b2.

I've always had my library in the recommended X:\Artist\Album\Track format with the tags matching the folder names. BIG SURPRISE: It didn't matter what method SS used - I never have seen any of the problems others are talking about.

Why does every user think that the developer should rewrite the program just to accomodate all the unique library configurations that users come up with?

This ought to stir up a hornet's nest.

Happy Father's Day

[gurutech]

What I don't understand is why anyone would "sort" their music in a way other than Artist/Album/Track. That seems to be the easiest way to keep things organized.

No offense to those who sort in ways other than that, I just don't see the reason why...

[alphawave7]

What I don't understand is why anyone would "sort" their music in a way other than Artist/Album/Track. That seems to be the easiest way to keep things organized.

No offense to those who sort in ways other than that, I just don't see the reason why...

Work. It takes effort. iTunes users in particular were not conditioned to need to sort their libraries, and are often at a disadvantage when it comes to organising and tagging their files, yet simple tools exist to do it..some near automagically. Then you have the whole format wars...it will never end!

[hakko]

I've seen people using:

[FORMAT]/[ARTIST]/[ALBUM]/TITLE.EXT where FORMAT = LOSSLESS, LOSSY, BOOTLEG etc
[GENRE]/[ARTIST]/[ALBUM]/TITLE.EXT
[ARTIST - YEAR - ALBUM]/TITLE.EXT

I think they all makes sense in their own way. Ideally, a music player shouldn't put constraints on it's users.

[BKKKPewsey]

[ARTIST - YEAR - ALBUM]/TITLE.EXT

Only that option would cause problems with SS because it wouldn't find the artist.
But <Artist>\<Year> - <Album>\<Title>.ext works fine

[zeke]

I can't see any Album art in the Home/Random window in IE 8 on WHS v1. No error, no place holder icon, just blank with the titles showing in their normal positions, but nothing can be selected.

Same site works fine in IE 9 and Chrome.

Could be a bummer for XP users - if there are any left out there ...

Hi Sindre et al.,

Very hardcore subsonic user, really love the software! Never posted on the forum before...

I've also noticed this is a problem on various versions of IE; I agree that it seems fine with Firefox, Chrome, etc.

Also want to note that I wish one could choose the sorting of albums! I think they were listed alphabetically in the past, which was cool because all my stuff is tagged like "Artist - Year - Album Name" so it was always sorted in chronological order both in subsonic and in my filesystem (ext4). However, now with the sorting by year, it's sorted in reverse chronological order, and there's no way to choose! I liked it the other way (or in general in chronological order) just because I can then hit "Play All" when they are sorted that way for a single artist and listen to everything in that order (not sure why I tend to do that).

Thanks!

Zeke

[pemholder]

I can't see any Album art in the Home/Random window in IE 8 on WHS v1. No error, no place holder icon, just blank with the titles showing in their normal positions, but nothing can be selected.

Same here with IE8 and Windows XP.

Maybe Sindre fixed the issue, that subsonic 4.6 had problems with album art in IE9. In IE9 it was necessary to activate its compatibility mode to show album art without flickering.

As users of Windows XP and older Windows versions can't update to IE9, subsonic does not work anymore with Windows XP and IE.

[GJ51]

OK - 4.7 beta 2 testing in the Mancave is pretty much done. I have it installed and tested on 3 platforms.

1. Windows Server 2008 R2 on a dual quad core 2.83GHz Xeon w/16GB ram - Standard Windows install
2. Windows Server 2008 Web edition installed on machine 1. as a VM using 2GB ram. This is a WAR installation Tomcat 6.0
3. WHS v1 32 bit standard Windows installation on an HP EX485 with 4GB ram and upgrade CPU, 3.0GHz Dual Core Xeon.

Common issues:

I still find that I need 3 versions of ffmpeg to get the best performance.

In order to get ogg for Android to work i have to use the ffmpeg from ver 4.4 of SS.

For video playback the build from Zeranoe dated 3/6/12 (the ffmpeg inside is dated 3/7/12) provides smoother playback and can read and use the index data.

The distribution ffmpeg will handle most common uses. Oddly, the WAR installation can play some videos with the distribution ffmpeg that do not play on the standard Windows install. Both work better with the ffmpeg version described above.

4.7 b2 has issues displaying video folders. Inconsistent at best. I have 3 video folders on the WHS install that won't show. They are folders on the local machine defined as shares in the same way as the music folders that do show with identical permission settings. I have had these folders display previously, but then deactivated them while trying to sort out some issues and now they are not populating the subfolders. The defined folder names show on the left side, but when selected no videos show up. I've rescanned 4 times, with and without Fast access mode selected, rebooted, and still the videos won't show. I've seen others report this, but it's the first time it's happened to me that I wan't able to resolve the problem.

Android Players: I use ogg for Android playback. We really need to be able to define the transcodings for the Android Players so that when a new Android user logs in the player automatically picks up the defined Android transcoding. Currently, each new Android player has to manually be edited to use the ogg transcoding.

The same settings that work fine for ogg on Android do not work well on the iSub app. Tracks end early and the player moves to the next track. I don't use iSub, but this is what my iSub owners reported. I had to disable the ogg transcoding for them and then they were fine getting the standard mp3 output. Probably an iSub issue.

Next project: Testing Subsonic 4.7 on Windows Server 8 Release Candidate. That should be fun.

[glic3rinu]

I'm using tomcat for my deployment and in a period of 3 hours the java process has hanged 4 times. At some point it starts to consume all CPU it can get and then stops serving requests. When it happends subsonic is completely unresponsiveness and the only thing I can do is restart tomcat.

I have found that this always happens when someone clicks the "Top rated" menu.

[madhusker]

I can't see any Album art in the Home/Random window in IE 8 on WHS v1. No error, no place holder icon, just blank with the titles showing in their normal positions, but nothing can be selected.

Same site works fine in IE 9 and Chrome.

Could be a bummer for XP users - if there are any left out there ...

Hi Sindre et al.,

Very hardcore subsonic user, really love the software! Never posted on the forum before...

I've also noticed this is a problem on various versions of IE; I agree that it seems fine with Firefox, Chrome, etc.

Also want to note that I wish one could choose the sorting of albums! I think they were listed alphabetically in the past, which was cool because all my stuff is tagged like "Artist - Year - Album Name" so it was always sorted in chronological order both in subsonic and in my filesystem (ext4). However, now with the sorting by year, it's sorted in reverse chronological order, and there's no way to choose! I liked it the other way (or in general in chronological order) just because I can then hit "Play All" when they are sorted that way for a single artist and listen to everything in that order (not sure why I tend to do that).

People actually still use IE??

I agree there seems to be needs for flexible sorting. I don't have time to update tags on thousands of songs and just want my file system shown so I can select what I want without searching. Others are the opposite and put all songs in 1 directory itunes style and could care less because they can find them with tags. Unfortunately we need both it seems.... I haven't loaded the beta, but I'm excited and just keeping an eye on the changes.

-MH

[zeke]

I can't see any Album art in the Home/Random window in IE 8 on WHS v1. No error, no place holder icon, just blank with the titles showing in their normal positions, but nothing can be selected.

Same site works fine in IE 9 and Chrome.

Could be a bummer for XP users - if there are any left out there ...

Hi Sindre et al.,

Very hardcore subsonic user, really love the software! Never posted on the forum before...

I've also noticed this is a problem on various versions of IE; I agree that it seems fine with Firefox, Chrome, etc.

Also want to note that I wish one could choose the sorting of albums! I think they were listed alphabetically in the past, which was cool because all my stuff is tagged like "Artist - Year - Album Name" so it was always sorted in chronological order both in subsonic and in my filesystem (ext4). However, now with the sorting by year, it's sorted in reverse chronological order, and there's no way to choose! I liked it the other way (or in general in chronological order) just because I can then hit "Play All" when they are sorted that way for a single artist and listen to everything in that order (not sure why I tend to do that).

People actually still use IE??

I agree there seems to be needs for flexible sorting. I don't have time to update tags on thousands of songs and just want my file system shown so I can select what I want without searching. Others are the opposite and put all songs in 1 directory itunes style and could care less because they can find them with tags. Unfortunately we need both it seems.... I haven't loaded the beta, but I'm excited and just keeping an eye on the changes.

-MH

When I use IE, it's not by choice! Usually on a work computer that isn't my own. But I would hope my browser snobbiness shouldn't preclude someone somewhere from using it.

-Z

[supra92]

In testing 4.7b2 on my Scientific Linux 5.7 box, I once again had to roll back to 4.6 for the interim, just as I did with 4.7b1. Issues with 4.7x tend to be more prominent for those people that prefer to see their artists' albums presented in chronological order (the way one would see them in allmusic.com, or any standard discography), as opposed to alphabetically.

I can't speak for others, but I know that the reason 4.7 has been the most jarring release in recent memory for me is because SS had sorted things *alphabetically by directory name* since the very get go. So we're talking over 7 years of having the same basic display mechanism. My Music tree is structured thusly, both to accommodate this 7+ year SS standard, as well as because it's how I'd name my Linux directories anyways:

Beatles
      1963 - Please Please Me
      1963 - With The Beatles
      1964 - A Hard Day's Night
      1964 - Beatles For Sale
      1965 - Help!           (etc. etc.)
King Crimson
      1969 - In The Court Of The Crimson King
      1970 - In The Wake Of Poseidon
      1970 - Lizard
      1971 - Islands      (etc. etc.)

That's how my actual directories in Linux/Windows are named, and that is also how they've appeared in Subsonic for over 7 years. When I think of the Beatles' first album, I don't think of Abbey Road (first alphabetically), I think of Please Please Me from 1963 because it's the first one they ever released. Chronological/discography-style display is the only way I could ever conceive of looking at an artist's albums.

So when v4.7b1 nixed sorting by directory and went instead with the "Album title" ID3 tag, that rocked my world (and not in a good way * grin *). I'm very appreciative to see v4.7b2 return to displaying by directory name again. That said, there's two things I'm seeing that are precluding my adoption of 4.7b2 at present:

1. v4.7b2 is now displaying the Year of an album to the right of the album title. I can see this being of benefit for others, but for me and those of us whose directories are already of the YYYY - AlbumTitle format, seeing the album year a *second* time off to the right is a bit disconcerting. That in and itself wouldn't be a dealbreaker, except that SS is not reliable about grabbing that Year. In most of my artists' discographies, SS finds the Year in only 3 or 4 of the albums, and the rest are blank. Which leads us to #2....

2. Subsonic sorts the albums *for which it locates the Year* in Reverse Chronological Order, ie newest first. As with most here, I strongly prefer to see the first album first, and the last album last. BUT, SS sorts alphabetically all the rest of the albums for which it *cannot* find the Year. So now my artist's display is a jumbled mess, as follows:

REM:

2011 - Collapse Into Now                     2011
2008 - Accelerate                               2008
1994 - Monster                                   1994
1991 - Out Of Time                            1991
1985 - Fables Of The Reconstruction   1985
1983 - Murmur
1984 - Reckoning
1986 - Life's Rich Pageant
1987 - Document
1988 - Green
1992 - Automatic For The People
1996 - New Adventures In Hi Fi
1998 - Up
2004 - Around The Sun

Note how that list goes reverse-chrono for the first five (as SS is reverse-chrono sorting the five albums for which it found a Year), and then starts back at 1983 - Murmur and goes chronologically back up (as SS is merely sorting alphabetically, and my dir structure is YYYY - AlbumTitle).

That REM example right there is why I'm unfortunately having to sit out 4.7b2 for now. My hope is that SS either just returns to the tried-and-true alphabetical listing of folders..... or it gets better at locating the Year and sorts them chronologically, earliest album first.

A bit long-winded, but hopefully this conveys the issue well enough. Really happy to see some new SS releases coming out again, and looking forward to 4.7b3/4.7.

[EDIT] - as a side note, I'm pretty obsessive about how files are named and tagged -- all of the ID3 tag info is absolutely there for every album without exception. I use EAC/AutoFLAC to rip lossless FLACs (with the tag info), and then i use a perl script called "flac2mp3" which 'rips' MP3s from those FLACs, preserving the ID3 tags. The Year tag is unequivocally present, and I took the usual steps to troubleshoot 4.7b2's haphazard Year locating: deleted Catalina work folder, did a full Index scan, did a SECOND full index scan for good measure, confirmed yet again that Subsonic/Tomcat user has appropriate permissions to the files, etc. etc.

Cheers,
Supra92

[GJ51]

DONE IN 4.7
-------------
Don't display "null" as artist in now playing.
Fixed crash on Java 7 caused by wrong sorting implementation.

TODO IN 4.7
-----------------
Auto-import playlists
Make it possible to turn off album year display.
Video has playlist features (PLay all, Add all..)
Admins should be able to manage all playlists.
Show all playlist metadata. (Shared with all users, Shared with 4 users, 12 songs, 45:34)


Let's hope the final works for you.