Subsonic 4.7.beta3 released

[achmetinternet]

When I try to use an external player (VLC 2) then I am getting the VLC window inside my browser but it stays black with the symbol in the middle. It does not play music nor movies.

[PieterB]

Try Foobar2000, that is an excellent, lean player:
http://www.foobar2000.org/download
Do not forget to point m3u files to that player....

Could it be that transcoding is responsible?

PB

[GJ51]

I've had the same issue for some time. I;ve found the external player feature to be very unstable for some time now. I have been able to get it working with IE 9, but I prefer Chrome for SS and haven't had much success using VLC.

The most stable combination if you really want to use the external player feature is to use IE 9 and WMP as the default player.

Of course this only applies Windows users.

Peraonally, I haven't had any need to use an external player as I have everything working very well in the embedded player, but if a feature is there I would like to see it work properly.

I actually like the idea of SS calling VLC right into the browser frame when it's selected as an external player as I've long been a fan of VLC and have suggested in the past that it should replace JW as the embedded player which would eliminate the need to do the transcoding on the server side and make it possible to offload the video demand to the client requesting the video. If that was the case I'd be able to serve video from a Rasberry Pi

I do have a Pi and hope to set up an SS instance for music on it soon.

We'll have a Rasberry Pi site up soon that anyone whose interested in can take a look at in a week or so.

http://www.raspibakers.com/

[PieterB]

I just added comments to a an album. Of course saved the comment. Then I edited the tags. A minor edit, I changed the year. And my carefully crafted text had disappeared! To be sure, I repeated the sequence, and YES the comment disappeared again.

That IS a bug.

PB

[HerrNilsson]

Hello

I dont know if this is a bug or something.
But when i download a cover from the build in cover getting thingy it doesnt show in the main page.
I can see the cover in the chat window but not under Now Playing. Just the original black with a note on it.

[PieterB]

Just clean the cache of your browser.... Sometimes even 'refresh' (top of your music column) will do the trick.
HTH

PB

[HerrNilsson]

I've tried it in two browsers but still doesnt work.
But if i update it on one browser and then login on another and find that album, it's there.

[PieterB]

If you want the DB really to be fresh, go to Settings > Media Folders > Scan media folders now......
That will definitely solve your 'problem'.

It is a very nice feature, BTW
Thanks for all the GOOD work, Sindre

PB

[HerrNilsson]

I scan the folders every night automatically.

[Alsaya]

But only for folders one level down, I've multicd albums in a cd per folder under a folder named for the album and got no year, even I have it in the name of the folder.

[PieterB]

But only for folders one level down, I've multicd albums in a cd per folder under a folder named for the album and got no year, even I have it in the name of the folder.

I think that this message isn't very clear.... I think it is about the same problem I wrote about, but please be more specific!

[BKKKPewsey]

I just added comments to a an album. Of course saved the comment. Then I edited the tags. A minor edit, I changed the year. And my carefully crafted text had disappeared! To be sure, I repeated the sequence, and YES the comment disappeared again.

That IS a bug.

PB

I can confirm this - any tag edit removes the album comment

[Nebol]

Hi!

New user here. Used kplaylist before, but nothing has happened with kplaylist since 2008 so....

I'm using the latest 4.7 beta3, downloaded yesterday.

I think a lot of people are using network shares, so the installation process should really ask for
a login/password for the service.
As it is now, we have to google the issue when the scanning doesn't work. Not a good first impression.

The scanning process is really slow. I have 13k mp3's divided by artist folders.
My audio folder is on a dedicated fileserver running Opensolaris and ZFS. Scanning that folder should
be very fast. Inserting the songs into a database should be fast too.
But subsonic scans about 1200 songs per HOUR.
I'm assuming something else is done that slows it down, like searching for info online?
My suggestiong is thus: Scan the folder first. Just scan. Then, insert into database. Wham! All done.
The user can click and play his music.
Then, in a background thread, do the web searching and find more info on the songs. I don't care
how long THAT takes, it's secondary as long as I can listen to my music and see how it looks in subsonic.

Also, a common thing must be to rename a song in the filesystem. Meaning you have to re-scan all of the 13k songs...
AND you have to clean the entire database to remove the old incorrectly named file.
It would be useful to have the option of re-scanning just a certain folder.
It would also be useful to do the cleaning at the same time you scan. That way you just have to access the disk ONCE.
Scan the folder into a tree, compare against old info & clean, then add new songs. One operation (for the user) instead of two.

Hmm also, is the internal DB slow? Would be nice having the option to use an existing database server instead.

Well, that's it for now. Great software, I'm glad I found it!

Best regards,
N.

[GJ51]

I suspect that the slow scans are the result of the difficulties related to the file structure between the OS that hosts Subsonic and the file server. I'd bet that if you hosted SS on the file server it'd be lightning quick.

I have 50k+ files on my server and it scans the entire library in under 2 minutes. My site and the media library are on different host machines and the files are being served from network shares. The setup for editing the service permissions is available in the Tutorial section, but I agree that it would be nice if there was some way to do this step as part of the installation routine. One way around having to do this repeatedly when doing upgrades is to use the WAR version. Then you just define the permissions for the Apache Toncat service and when you upgrade you just drop in the new WAR file.

Also, remember that the forums are pretty responsive to the needs of new users. If you can't find an answer through search, just ask.

[hakko]

Also, a common thing must be to rename a song in the filesystem. Meaning you have to re-scan all of the 13k songs...
AND you have to clean the entire database to remove the old incorrectly named file.
It would be useful to have the option of re-scanning just a certain folder.
It would also be useful to do the cleaning at the same time you scan. That way you just have to access the disk ONCE.
Scan the folder into a tree, compare against old info & clean, then add new songs. One operation (for the user) instead of two.

Hmm also, is the internal DB slow? Would be nice having the option to use an existing database server instead.

Since Sindre has had the good taste of releasing the code he's writing under the GPL (cheers for that!), people have built all sorts of things on top of his software.

I've written a modified Subsonic server for people with huge music libraries, where I've replaced some components of the original code (like the media scanner and the media database) with a more efficient library. For example, it detects deleted files on scanning and removes them from db, and it allows re-scanning of a certain folder etc. It also uses PostgreSQL 9.1 instead of HSQLDB which honestly is far less powerful. Dig around on the forum and you'll find other such ideas as well on how to create different setups!