Best practices on working with large music collections

[gusi]

Interesting problem. I always assumed that there would be software available that can deal with large numbers of tags efficiently.

My collection is only half your size but it spans two hard disks. I currently have two paralell trees of a dozen or so genre directories.

From a database point of view it is a bit of a no no to store data based on itself or its metadata, ie organise album folders based on the genre tag. Too many records could fall into different categories. eg is something jazz or blues? Even if storing by artist we can get into trouble,eg should an album by Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong be stored under A or F?

I am now considering organising new music by day or week ripped eg 2006/w45, 2006/w46 etc. I am not planning to create a date ripped tag and it will be quite useful for incremental backups.

The downside of course is that there is no decent way to retrieve the files other than by tag.

20,000+ records is chicken feed for a real database. MySQL should be able to query that very quickly. Partial searches such as all artists containing the string "fitz" may take longer. Perhaps any DBs can elaborate.

From a DB point of view the app should be simple. Tools to open the various audio files and extract tags also exist. So it would just be a matter of joining them together. I'd be surprised if no one has done it before but I haven't had a good search around yet.

[badbob]

Badbob, you might want to look into the new Custom Browse plugin from erland - see the Plugins forum for threads. It looks like you could use it to construct a browse hierarchy of your own choosing.

HTH
Ceejay

ok thanks. I've copied the files into

C:\Program Files\SlimServer\server\Plugins

How do I enable it/spot it's installed and working? What should this plugin appear under server\plugins?

[gusi]

I just saw that slim already uses mySQL. I'll have to have a look where the schema is defined.

[ceejay]

ok thanks. I've copied the files into

C:\Program Files\SlimServer\server\Plugins

How do I enable it/spot it's installed and working? What should this plugin appear under server\plugins?

There are some notes here http://wiki.slimdevices.com/index.cgi?SlimServerPlugins about plugins in general.

If the plugin is correctly installed (in the server/plugins directory you should have a subdirectory called CustomBrowse containing more files and directories) it will show up in the list of plugins in the server settings/plugins page. You may need to stop and restart slimserver before it will be recognised. When it appears in the list, ensure it is ticked.

This plugin is more complex than most and requires some careful reading of the notes, though! I'm not an expert in its use, if you get stuck I suggest asking in the plugins forum.

HTH
Ceejay

[badbob]

Installed the plugin and shows up in server/plugins but nothing to adjust. What do I do now?

I have my music branched out like this

A\
B\
etc to Z

With each artist name under each main directory. So "Beatles" are grouped in

\Music\B\The Beatles\White album\1 - track.flac

So the list is managed to a few per letter, rather than 1000+ in one big directory (like database would be ie Winamp artist group) toooo slow scrolling down that amount of artists. If I browse by directory this is fine. However if I go into a artist directory ie B, then Beatles directory it'll show all albums by the beatles, but not any other beatles tracks from other directories (ie best of sixties in \various directory) I would like the database appear like folder appearence (B\ then \Beatles) but when you go into artist group it will also show all other Beatles tracks from anywhere in the \music directory

[erland]

Installed the plugin and shows up in server/plugins but nothing to adjust. What do I do now?

I would like the database appear like folder appearence (B\ then \Beatles) but when you go into artist group it will also show all other Beatles tracks from anywhere in the \music directory

The Custom Browse plugin adds a number of new browse menus, it does not affect the old browse menus. You will find the menus below "Browse Music/Custom Browse".

By default the Custom Browse plugins comes with a number of predefined menus, but the idea is that you can also define your own custom menus. The is menus is the defined by a text file in xml format which should be placed in the directory specified in the settings page for the Custom Browse plugin. The format of the xml file is described in README.txt file which is included in the CustomBrowse zip.

If you know how to write SQL/xml it should be possible for yourself to define your menus. If you don't it will probably be very hard and then I suggest that you specify how you would like the menus to look like here and me or someone else might be able to define the menus for you. So far I understand that you would like a menu like the following, but do you want more than this menu, for example similary top menus for aritsts, genres ?

Artists
- A
-- (All artists starting with A)
--- (All albums for selected artist)
---- (All tracks for selected album)
- B
-- (All artists starting with B)
--- (All albums for selected artist)
---- (All tracks for selected album)

[badbob]

Yes that's how I would like it, like any standard database but splitting up bands into a sub branch for the first letter of the band. I can't think of any other way of navigating music, any browsing method must cut down the selections otherwise navigation is a pig, unless shuffle by genre/artist/album, as you'll won't browse just choose to cut it down/choose genre, then start the shuffle -which'll be nice.

Shuffle by genre and shuffle by artist would be good. Do you have any other examples of storing database? I need to sort out genre tags though, many are missing, incorrect and difficult to decide what bands fit into which genre :-)

So here's an example of the layout of the \Music directory


And how I would like it to appear on the SB.



I do have a iriver H140 with Rockbox, browse with the folder method as it's alot quicker than database. Same problem though as you won't be able to see all tracks by that artist if tracks are elseware, unless you use utilities which'll move files from any other location into their respective artist directory, but that'll mess up album arrangment. You could copy but then eats up alot of disc space. It's the same problem with SB, either browse by folder for huge collections (I split iriver up A-D, since it's a smaller hard drive you'll have less on it so A-D won't have that many, but on the SB it would) or use DB and have a huge "artist" branch and only use letter search to cut the list down. Or ideally this custom browser, best of both worlds splitting bands into first letter, then the band, plus have any other tracks from other places on the hard drive.

I don't know how to write SQL, opened it up. I have written HTML and batch files so it doesn't look complicated, however sort of thing I would take a few hours to do wheras someone else could do it in a minute :-(

[erland]

The attached file is a new "Artists by letter" menu for the Custom Browse plugin that hopefully is what you would like. Please try it out and tell me if it works as you would like or not.

Installation instructions:
1. Check what the setting "Browse Configuration Directory" in the settings page for the Custom Browse plugin in the web interface is. It should point to a directory, if it doesn't set it to an existing directory.
2. Unzip the attached file into this directory, you should get a "deepartists.cb.xml" file.
3. Browse to "Custom Browse/Artists by letter" add see if the new menu works as you like.

[badbob]

yay thanks alot! Spot on :-)

[bobmonhoo]

As for how to organize a music collection i took (based on some good advise in these forums awhile ago) the one large directory approach (i.e., drive:\music\flac\tracknumbersongname.flac). This structure with the corresponding tags seems to perform very well with slimserver (at this point i have ~500 albums/~7000 songs). I mean why potentially confuse the tag info by having 'hard-coded' a directory structure? Anyone have any downsides to this approach?