JulianL Wrote: > Oooh. That's a very very interesting suggestion. You're lucky you didn't > go the Artistsort route because as you can see from my initial post, > that would have taken you straight back to your "initially dismayed" > state which is where I'm at now. > > I have 2 problems at the moment with going the "Browse Music Folder" > route but maybe they can both be resolved. My issues with browsing > music folders are: > > 1) (This one is nothing to do with Slim Devices but I'll list it for > completeness.) I am using the Telcanto client and for some reason it > doesn't display the "folder.jpg" album cover art when browsing by music > folder. Hopefully when I report this it will be fixed because the native > Slim Server web interface shows the cover art OK and Telcanto shows it > OK when browsing by artist. > > 2) After much deliberation I adopted a directory structure on my PC > of: > > FLAC\Artist_<A,B,C..Z>\<Artist Name>\<Album>\<Track(s)> > > Unfortunately this means that when I browse by music folder I get an > extra level of directory structure that I deliberately introduced so as > to keep my disk files organised, i.e. the 26 <Artist_A,B,C..Z> > directories, but when browsing I don't want this division and just want > to scroll smoothly from the As to the Bs to the Cs all in one flat > list. > > I just tried a quick experiment on my PC with shortcuts. I created a > shortcut at the "FLAC\..." level by creating a "FLAC\Bowie, David" > shortcut that points to my "FLAC\Artists_B\Bowie, David" directory. > This pretty much works in SlimServer in that browse by music folder > does see the "Bowie, David" as a clickable link under "FLAC" and when I > click on it it takes me to the contents of the "FLAC\Artists_B\Bowie, > David" directory, i.e. the list of the David Bowie albums. This means > that I could apply an "alternative view" on my current directory > structure by creating a very top level "J:\Music" folder that just > contains shortcuts to each of my individual artist directories and > point SlimServer at this directory as the root music folder. This way I > can still keep my FLAC files manageably (to me) split into <Artist_*> > directories but create a flat artist namespace for SlimServer (although > I haven't checked yet whether the SlimServer scan will follow the links > when it's compiling its tag database). > > My remaining issues with the above are: > > 1) Will the SlimServer scan correctly follow shortcuts? > > 2) There is one annoying thing where, when browsing by music folder, > SlimServer (and hence Telcanto too) displays the shortcut as "Bowie, > David.lnk" rather than just "Bowie, David". I guess I should file this > as a bug. > > 3) The album directories are sorted alphabetically so I loose the > chronological ordering that I'd so carefully created using Albumsort > tags. I really don't want to mess up the naming of my Album directories > by prefixing the directory name with a year. This last issue is probably > the show stopper for me. > > So, after some debate (most of which you just witnessed above!) I think > I'm back to filing the request for encancement and hoping I can get a > feature whereby the Artistsort tag value can be used instead of the > Artist value where appropriate for the list views (which does make a > huge amount of sense, if SlimServer is delivering a list that has been > sorted using Albumsort substitutions then surely it makes sense to have > an option for the labeling of that list to reflect the labels used to > sort it). This week has been a bit of a nightmare work-wise so I really > wil try to file the request in Bugzilla this weekend. > > - Julian.
I can't help with the Albums being sorted incorrectly of course. They're like that for me too right now. It's annoying, but I deal with it for now. I also don't feel like renaming all the album directories as "YYYY-MM-DD <album name>". As that's a show stopper, discussing the other issue probably doesn't matter, but I will anyway. While I don't file into 26 separate directories by the first artist letter, I do have everything filed into three directories because my collection spans three drives (a 160G and two 120G). I'm running my server on FreeBSD, and my "music" folder is actually just a series of soft links, one for each artist, to the real artist directory. As you found, a similar strategy can probably be used on Windows with links. I think that the scan will follow the shortcuts, as I've seen in the past discussion of issues arising from having circular links set up, I think accidentally (don't do it!). I can't speak to the irritating ".lnk" showing up when browsing links; I'll keep that in mind as a further reason to stay away from Windows. -- eq72521 _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
