Support for Library Order in artist list, yet LastFM works

[ccandreva]

Here's a tough one.

All my music has proper metadata, according to Last.fm standards. However, I name my artist directories in library order, so that all my "Elton John" music is in a directory "John, Elton". Last.fm doesn't like this. I would like some way for Subsonic to be able to support displaying library order, yet still keep Last.fm happy.

Ideally right now, I would be able to just drop a file called something like '.artist' into each directory with the artist name, but that's very Unix centric. How about 'artist.fm' ?

Other ideas welcomed.

[acroyear]

As I've written elsewhere, the API supports "ID3" browsing, which just looks at the artist and album tags, completely ignoring where on the file system it is (other than, for 6.0, which top-level Music Folder it is in). Apps that use that feature will always get the ID3-accurate artist info.

Solutions for the Web UI proposed have been 1) assuming the hierarchy of the file system is artist->album->songs, to dig into the first song to pull up the ID3 info and use that instead of the folder names, or 2) to actually have the ID3 artist-album browsing directly supported in the UI as an option. Then there's your third option, a kind of metadata file that can be used to set it (and potentially set artist artwork, if you're not a fan of the ancient black and white photos last.fm tends to use all the time ).

I'm personally more in favor of #1 - have the folders' artist/album info set by looking at the contained songs' ID3 files during the scan instead of relying on the folder names.

Sindre has not responded on that thread, last I checked.

[acroyear]

One advantage to using your external file idea, or some DB-stored metadata, is that it allows one to override the default name or the default group with a particular name. E.g., "Three" (Emerson, Berry, Palmer, an ELP spin-off from 1988) is a group name that has been used by others, and the last.fm search comes up with the wrong one. By having additional meta data settings available, users could override the default choice and make sure last.fm found the right one for us.