Audio by Directories

[DmitrySkibitsky]

People who listen to music often sort it by directories. Why does nobody add this structure to the audio players? I have +4k songs and a lot without tags. It's not practical to use the application.

[martpie]

Hello :)

Could be an interesting addition to (or duplicates of) #130

Why does nobody add this structure to the audio players

Because this very usecase is quite uncommon, and the complexity to implement that really hard: Museeks is a Another way to solve it could be to have a context menu in Nautilus/Finder/whatever to play all tracks in the current folder.

[martpie]

and no need to be rude, if you don't like the app, feel free to uninstall it or fork it.

[YurySolovyov]

Not sure if it is (un)common, but I use it a lot in other players (not museeks everywhere yet, sorry)

[martpie]

Do you have player names so I can check how they achieve this?

[yury]

cc @KeitIG @YurySolovyov

[YurySolovyov]

@KeitIG http://www.aimp.ru/ (see EN language toggle at the top)

[DmitrySkibitsky]

@KeitIG , I do not think this app is bad. Just this I do not have enough in the audio players. Take the same deepin music, or Lollypop ... They have a maximum of Executors, Albums, etc. but nobody does the directory structure. For me, this is the most important thing.

[martpie]

The idea makes sense. How do you usually organize your library @DmitrySkibitsky?

I personally have something like music/artistslists/albumslist/trackslist

[martpie]

On the technical part, we might want to go back to what we had before, with folders added to the library.

Related to #338.

Some of the problems:

• circular references / symlinks
• how to display these (just a file explorer)?
• ...

[YurySolovyov]

One tricky part I can see in implementing this is how to get parent dir nicely.
For 99% of cases we can "just" grab the parent dir and that will be correct:

/music/Album-name/1.mp3
/music/Album-name/2.mp3
/music/Album-name/3.mp3
/music/Album-name/4.mp3
/music/Album-name/5.mp3
/music/Album-name/6.mp3
/music/Album-name/7.mp3

in that case you get Album-name and you're done.

But.

there are cases like:

/music/Album-name/CD1/1.mp3
/music/Album-name/CD1/2.mp3
/music/Album-name/CD1/3.mp3
/music/Album-name/CD1/4.mp3

/music/Album-name/CD2/1.mp3
/music/Album-name/CD2/2.mp3
/music/Album-name/CD2/3.mp3
/music/Album-name/CD2/4.mp3

And I'm not sure what's the good heuristic for getting Album-name in that case.
Maybe just take everything between filename and root directory for the music dir:
Album-name/CD1 and Album-name/CD2 ? 🤷‍♂️

[DmitrySkibitsky]

@KeitIG, At me it is similar. But do not attach nesting to a specific value. Simply banal "Directory structure" After all, somewhere there is a path to the audio file in some file "all_files.db" Draw the directory structure, and then click on the path to "output audio", go through all_files.db and compare . Looks easy))

[YurySolovyov]

(follow-up to my prev. post)
Or, we can treat all folders inside root as albums regardless how files are stored inside:
so that for

/music/Album-name/CD1/1.mp3

we just take Album-name as folder name and scan everything inside recursively

[DmitrySkibitsky]

I just do not know how it works. I just introduced.

[FinlayDaG33k]

I also would like this functionality to be added.
The music player (Blackplayer EX) on my phone has it and the Plex app has it.

I personally sort my music like /music/genre/<artist or band> - <album name> (<year>)/<artist or band> - <title>.<ext>.
It makes it a lot easier to find a specific one I want since I know where to find it at all times (without having to remember the name of the track, I just go like: "this artist, this album, this number in the list... ah so that was it's name"), which is especially helpful considering I do listen quite a bit of J-pop (so remembering, let alone typing the names is kinda difficult).

[igorer88]

@YurySolovyov, @martpie
How about to create independents music libraries?
for example:

• Music/<Lib name>/<album artist>/<[year] album>
• Music/OST/<[year] compositor - movie>
• Music/Recordings/<song title>
• Music/...

So we could track just the folders that the user wants

Note: Using Album Artist instead of Artist would simplify things.

[martpie]

Closing. I've give it some thoughts and TL,DR, I won't implement it:

• We should not make assumptions on how the library of people is organized, the software should work the same if someone has all his tracks in one folder, everything nicely organized or something chaotic.
• More views than just TracksList: artists and albums #130 will be a way to get there
• It's useless to re-implement a file manager withing Museeks, if you want to use your library like that, we should implement Make it possible to associate supported file types with museeks #154, so you can use your favorite Finder/Nautilus/Whatever and play your tracks from there :)