Subsonic upgrade to 4.7

[pendletone55]

I use an external drive for my music file at my POB. I had it all scanned and had also created some playlists. I upgraded last week and then unplugged the drive from my computer and took it home for the weekend. I did not do anything to it other than unplugging it. Today I plugged it back into my computer and all my playlists and music scans were gone. I had to rescan the entire collection of 180,000 songs which took awhile, but that didn't trouble me as much as the fact that my playlist are now all empty. Even after the rescan of the music, all that shows for the playlists are just the title of each playlist, but it shows zero songs in the playlist collection. Which means I have to rebuild the entire collection of songs in each one.

First of all, I think it was a mistake to take away our ability to manipulate these lists outside of Subsonic and second of all, this is going to create a real problem if I actually lose all the scans and playlists every time I unplug the USB external drive. Not happy with the upgrade at this point.

[hakko]

This is an interesting topic. If you unplug your hard drive and scan your library, what is expected outcome? You don't want artists, albums and songs from the unplugged hard drive to show up when searching or browsing, right? So I think it does make sense remove them from the database. When the hard drive is plugged in again, a full re-scan is needed. To avoid the full re-scan, you'd need to turn off the scanning while your hard drive is unplugged. Or do you have better ideas on how the program should behave?

I agree about playlists though, I'm old-fashioned and think about them as .m3u files containing file paths. If you unplug/plug your hard-drive, they should obviously still work afterwards, too.

[pendletone55]

Your answer makes sense except for this; when I am away from the location where the subsonic service is running and connected to that external drive, I actually stop the service when I remove the drive. However, I stopped it last Friday after i removed it. Maybe if i stop the service prior to removing it and and don't start it again until after I plug it back in it will retain these settings in the db.

Be that as it may, it should still be the users choice to have the scans wiped out rather than have it done by default. Just saying...

[hakko]

I was thinking about it and I couldn't come up with a clean solution for how to present this to the average user. Since the scan is async, it can't really pop up a window saying "do you want to keep this drive, that seems gone, in your db?". On most *ix systems, a drive like that would just get mounted somewhere and appear as a folder that had been removed (which the scanner should then remove from the db). So it's hard to tell that this removed folder happens to be a drive that will re-appear any minute and should be saved in the db.

It would be elegant if the scanner identified this specific scenario and asked the user about how to handle it, but I can't come up with a good way to do that. That's why I'm curious if somebody has a brilliant solution (that I could then implement).

[pendletone55]

Thanks so much for replying and at least thinking about it. That's my only issue with the application other than the service stopping on the ReadyNAS Pro every morning and having to manually start it up.