MusicCabinet - artist radio, genre radio & related artists

[hiphutch]

First, Thank you for this awesome plugin! I am excited about this mod. I just installed it and am currently going through the indexing. I have a fairly large collection with around 300,000 songs, so it is taking some time to update.

Subsonic without any mods ran quickly and everything came up fast. I am currently going through the indexing after I have installed MusicCabinet, but have already noticed one issue with this mod. The main display is trying to load thousands of albums with artwork on the main page. This is causing the system to run extremely slow.

I currently have my collection broken down into sub folders by alpha letter before it goes into the artist folders. For example:

M:\music\a\Artist Whos Name Starts With An A\Album\track - song.mp3
M:\music\b\Artist Whos Name Starts With A B\Album\track - song.mp3

so like,

m:\music\q\Queen\News of the World\01 - We Will Rock You.mp3

I have it setup in this manner for a few reasons. Mainly it is far faster to view folders if the system isn't trying to display 20,000 folders at once. Like wise, in subsonic, I don't want it to try to list 20,000+ artists all at once in the left navigation frame. It becomes way to slow and tedious to navigate.

In subsonic without any mods the right navigation frame just has the letters for each folder. I can then click a letter, like the A, and it will show a list on the right with all the artists names that start with A. This makes its load fairly fast. I can then click on the artist name in the main frame and it will show all the albums by that artist.

Currently with MusicCabinet, if I click on a letter like A, it then loads a gigantic list of albums with artwork. It appears to pick some random artist name that is in the A category. Then list every album by every artist whos name starts with an A in the album view along with the artwork sorted by release date. As one can imagine, loading thousands of albums with artwork in one display all in a single page is very time consuming.

Is there any way to fix this so that it behaves more like the default subsonic and allows one to transverse multiple levels of folders?

Thank you.

[hakko]

Hi hiphutch!

The reasoning behind MusicCabinet is to take an initial hit to allow for faster generation of playlists later on. Subsonic doesn't read meta-data of files during the scan (which makes the scanning fast and generation of random playlists quite slow). MusicCabinet reads meta-data for new files (and then caches it), so it'll read through your 300.000 files the first time you use it. It's gonna take a while. Actually, you'll have to run the search index a couple of times to get meta-data for all your artists, there's an upper limit of 4000 artists or so per update to not bail out completely.

For browsing, I've currently made it so that I assume that root folders in your Media folders represent artists.

For your setup, it'll therefore think that you only have artists called A, B, C etc and that they all have enormous amounts of albums. Not quite right. To fix this, go to Settings -> Media folders, remove "music" and instead add A, B, C etc as separate Media folders.

It'll mean 20.000+ artists in your left folder though. Currently, that's how it is. It would be possible to add some folder handling there, but it's nothing I've planned for atm.

Let me know how it behaves after you've done the Media folder change and the search index procedure has finished!

Regards

[mea]

hey hakko,

firstly, thanks for your great work ! i'll try this asap.
secondly, what skin are you using in your demo ?

thansk !

[hakko]

hi mea!

thanks! let me know how it works out, i'm always interested in negative/positive feedback.

the skin is called sonic_white. a friend of mine made the additional icons to go with that theme.

[jacobthe4th]

Good Day Hakko,

I hope you are enjoying the summer solstice. i have one question for you, once a user cleans their folder structure such that the Artist and Album IDs are read properly, how do I get Music Cabinet to re-import the those IDs. I can see in the tables where and why it is struggling (in most cases it is b/c of a subfolder in some of my albums that contians the Artwork, which I thought I had removed most of, but apparently not), but I don't know the most peaceful way of clearing the table entry.

Thanks,

Jacob

[hakko]

Hi Jacob!

What exactly is going wrong?

Currently, it is built so that whenever you update your search index, Subsonic scans your Media Folders and creates a file called subsonic15.index. MusicCabinet then hooks in and parses that file and updates the db tables to keep track of what your library consists of. After doing that, it fetches information from last.fm and stores in the database where appropriate.

If you rename or delete folders within your Media folders, that change should first be reflected in subsonic15.index and then in the Postgres database after doing a search index update (from Settings -> Search). Have you found some bug in that procedure?

The album artwork is then primarily fetched from last.fm. This is because my network at home is super slow and I wanted to ease the burden on it serving artwork. I should make that configurable.. but currently it isn't.

Anyway I'm not really sure what your error is. Could you explain it in more detail, giving a screenshot or a step by step guide or something so that I can reproduce it (or at least grasp it)? Thanks.

[jacobthe4th]

Hakko,

It is not too convenient to connect to the Music Cabinet DB right now, since I am not local to my server. So I will try to explain it as best as my memory serves me.

So, I went to create a Play Artist Radio playlist from the artist "Death Cab For Cutie" and the playlist does not get generated. I also tried to create playlist of the Play Top Tracks, but it was also not possible. I had found a few other artists in my collection where this was happening. Also, I went a similar artist (The Postal Service) and created a Play Artist Radio playlist expecting to see Death Cab For Cutie on, since Last.fm would normally include tracks from them in stations listened to by me previously on Last.FM.

So I decided to see what DB similarities these artists had, perhaps in the Folders of my collection and any of the DB tables in Music Cabinet. Looking through the artists that would not generate either of those playlist, I notice that when they did not have a ArtistID or AlbumID or the entry was wrong (ie. AlbumArtwork was listed as both an AlbumID and an ArtistID). These entries also did not function correctly when generating the playlist(s).

After, seeing that, I looked at the particular Artist directory and Album's folders and saw, very often the contents of one those artist's albums would have an additional sub-directory, containing rip logs, or album artwork. I removed those sub-directories and reran the Index search from SS. I thought this action may allow the IDs to properly defined, but so far they have not. AlbumID and ArtistID are still odd or missing.

I may be able to gather some screen shots later this evening. Until then...

Thanks,

Jacob

[hakko]

Jacob: well spotted! The MusicCabinet import definitely gets additional folders found below the actual album folder wrong during the scanning.

I tried different setups but I couldn't force the "play artist radio" or "play top tracks" to stop functioning, though. What does your folder structure look like exactly for "Death Cab For Cutie"? Do you think you could copy/paste those lines from subsonic15.index?

To be honest, the folder based browsing is a bit annoying. I hope to find time to make it solely based on tags. That would get rid of all these issues.

[Ultraviolet]

To be honest, the folder based browsing is a bit annoying. I hope to find time to make it solely based on tags. That would get rid of all these issues.

^^^This. This would be the single greatest step forward for mankind since the discovery of penicillin. I also hope you find the time:)

[vollbr0t]

pleeeaaaaaaaaasseee make this work with subsonic 4.7
pleeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaaaaasssssssse

[hakko]

What features from 4.7 would you like to see?

My next project is the media file handling in Subsonic. I don't like how it's written in 4.6 and I'm not super excited about 4.7 either. I'll probably end up writing my own solution, focusing on update speed/memory consumption. That's a pretty big job though so it's not gonna happen overnight.

I'll post whenever something new is available in the announcement thread: viewtopic.php?f=4&t=9777

[vollbr0t]

what i like about 4.7 is for example the new staring system, i think the old rating system is useless ...

but furthermore... i'd like to stay with sindres versions, because only this way it is guaranteed it will be compatible with other clients than browser-based ones (like the android app, chumby app, etc...)

[hakko]

Yeah, compatibility is tricky. My objective is to maintain support for the REST 1.7 interface, so that a MusicCabinet modded server keeps working with the apps that are available today.

I'm not sure about adapting to the REST 1.8 interface introduced in 4.7. I think I'd rather spend that time modding the existing android app, to add support for "artist radio", for example. That's such an important feature for me. Or adding some other new functionality to MusicCabinet itself.

Sindre's version and mine will always have different strengths. I just want a knowledgeable music server to use when at work, and to share and explore new music with my friends and family. So that's what I focus on to create. It's a bit of a niche product but it doesn't strive to be anything else, either.

[vollbr0t]

i just installed your awesome mod... and everything seems to work very well except one thing:

the searchengine is not able to get my "artist relations" from last.fm. it does not give an error or something like that, but after ~130/~3000 artists relation the update of the database just stops and musiccabinet says "MusicCabinet is up-to-date and running normally." on its status page. when i click on related artists on most of my artists it gives "Not a single related artist found!". On a few artists it shows relations... (i assume on ~130 ). For this reason artist-radio and some other great features do not work for me

[hakko]

Hmm. Which version are you using? from the about view, it should say version: Subsonic, original version 4.6. Built with MusicCabinet plugin, version 0.x.x.

It should be 0.5.48. (or 0.6.1 if you're going wild)

Could you also paste subsonic.log (from C:/subsonic or the equivalent) and musiccabinet.log (this is written to your temp directory, you have to search for it) somewhere online where I could have a look? If the import of artist relations failed, it show give a clue to why there (assuming you're using the latest version). Grab the log files before you restart Subsonic, musiccabinet.log gets overwritten when you start over. Thanks!