More than one »Music Folder«?

[Moonbase]

Unfortunately, the search here doesn’t seen to honor quoted searches, so after after getting 500 results for any combination of this I gave up …

My question: How can I input more than ONE »music folder«?

Basic Settings doesn’t seem to allow this. It does work when using MusicIP (which knows about the different folders) and leaving the »music folder« empty. Only I wanted to change to »get mixable status only« to see if this would improve rescan speed (on my 23,000 title library it currently takes short of 3 hours to rescan—it appears that it always tries to re-read the whole library).

For miscellaneous reasons, I cannot currently change the path names of the two music folders I have, since these are used by other software (SQL databases, MusicIP, playlists and so forth).

I’d very much appreciate a hint in the right direction—I think I must surely have overlooked something. SqueezeCenter won’t just handle one directory, or will it?

[Philip Meyer]

This is a very common question.

The current answer is to use shortcuts. eg. create a "Squeezecenter Music" folder, and put shortcuts inside that to each root music folder that you want to be scanned.

There are enhancement requests filed to make this easier to configure through settings. It's likely to happen in version 8.0.

[Moonbase]

Thanks for the answer.

I guess folder links won’t work for me—they’d break the MusicIP integration, right? As far as I know, this would be based on the file paths? Also, I fear I might lose the possibility to play (pre-made) playlists that refer to the original file paths.

Well, I’ll have to stick with using the »MusicIP Rescans« then, for the time being. After playing around with that yesterday, it actually didn’t take 3 hours as stated above but 5h30—at nearly 100% CPU on a 1.8 GHz system, the system running only SC and MusicIP.

Way too long. I really hope there’ll come something that speeds it a little, for those of us who currently can’t afford a 4x3 GHz Quad core 8 GB RAM machine with SATA/RAID drives… ;-) (Thats why I tried the new »only check mixable« feature in the first place.)

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I think the main reason for the »slowness« might be using the MIP HTTP API to get all data. Nevertheless, would it noticably improve speed to use an existing mySQL installation instead of the »built-in«?

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Is it possible to edit the initial thread title for me? (To make it more appropriate?)

[Philip Meyer]

>I guess folder links won’t work for me—they’d break the MusicIP
>integration, right?
No, it would still work, if the absolute file paths to the music files were the same in each application.

SC stores the path to each physical file, irrespective of whether it read the file through a shortcut.

So if you have the SC music folder pointed to D:\Music\SqueezeCenter, and had two links in that folder:
Phil's Music -> M:\Music\Phil
Alex's Music -> N:\Music\Alex

The SC database would contain music with paths beginning with M:\Music\Phil, and N:\Music\Alex.

You point MusicIP to read files directly from the two folders.

>Also, I fear I might lose the possibility to play (pre-made)
>playlists that refer to the original file paths.
>
Playlists will also be fine, for the same reason.

Phil

[Moonbase]

Now that sounds promising, better than expected. I guess I’ll give it a try later on.

I should probably leave all other setups/programs unchanged and in SC set »only check mixable« and point the Music Folder to the »Link Container«?

[snarlydwarf]

Now that sounds promising, better than expected. I guess I’ll give it a try later on.

I should probably leave all other setups/programs unchanged and in SC set »only check mixable« and point the Music Folder to the »Link Container«?

Yes, that would be best. (The "let me read all the tags and stuff from MusicIP" was a huge annoyance for me and made me give up on MusicIP which liked to "fix" tags for some reason... and it makes library scans a ton faster, too.)

[Moonbase]

It’s just running now on a 23,000 title collection here …

I’ll keep you updated but I can already say Philip’s explanation helped a lot (and it seems a lot faster scanning).

MusicIP I love for the »musical fingerprint« stuff and the great MusicBrainz integration, and also for the blindingly fast and flexible searching possibilities. An other important point is of course the flexible way to come up with great mixes, in my case often for listening at leisure. I really enjoy hanging around in the living room and being able to create a new mix by simply pressing a button—thanks to the SqueezeCenter/MusicIP integration. :-)

But I’ve even used MusicIP Mixer as a sidekick for help in creating real radio shows. It’s just great being able to search things like »?rock && eighties && language contains "ger"« or »?trance && (bpm >= 140 && bpm <= 145) && key="F"« … :-)

Maybe an idea for SqueezeCenter integration: Let us store »custom searches« somewhere, show them like »playlists« and let the MIP API deliver?

[Moonbase]

Good news: The rescan on some 23,000 titels is finished, and really much »faster«: »Only« 3 hours 26 minutes (instead of 5 hours 30 minutes).

So this means: The folder link thingy under Windows (XP in this case) works. A Good Thing.

Bad news: It doesn’t show anything as »mixable« that has non-ASCII characters in the filename (like L'ÂME IMMORTELLE or Grönemeyer, Herbert). Not usable. So much time wasted again … *sigh*.

This bug is most probably due to the MusicIP API always returning filename strings as UTF-8 and thusly not matching those SC found out. Since »mixable« is found out by querying the MIP API for a path, we have a problem. I posted about this bug over at the MusicIP forums a while ago, maybe you’d like to help complaining so they raise priority on this one …

Or maybe some SC developers would take a heart and convert what comes back from the MIP API back to properly encoded file paths (this would also give a much nicer display on the SC Web GUI). This would also make sense for Linux systems using ISO-8859-1 (or -15) as file system character set (I actually have one that does), whereas there also are Linux systems supporting UTF-8 file systems. So I guess it would make sense in the long run to either set the file system character encoding per »Music Folder« path, or just use the »standard« file system character encoding for the system the SC is compiled for—this should easily be done using the appropriate OS calls.

(I did that to interface MusicIP to another application—SAM Broadcaster—and it works, until we get something better.)

All this somehow must have been addressed already: When I use only the MusicIP rescan (and leave the »Music Folder« blank), all files will be found and be »mixable« correctly. They’re still shown with »illegible characters« though, i.e. »electromélange« shows as »electromélange«.

Looks like I have to go back to step one and go back to the (slower) »MusicIP-only mode«, for the time being.

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Now the next step will be to iron out the album count differences between SC and MusicIP (SC: 6128, MusicIP: 3502).

Then, to see if SC runs faster on my local »real« mySQL instead of under its own »mini mySQL«.

Then, to see if SC can somehow be made »usable for real life«, i.e. take all the sluggishness out of it … just took 12 minutes to present me with an empty list of all Genre "Rock" songs (3,769 as MusicIP Mixer found out in about .2 seconds).

Then, to see if crossfading can be made to work (is horribly stuttering and rebuffering now so I had to switch it off).

Oh well, I’m using v7.3-24179, and it’s SOFTware (a Good Thing), so there is still hope. :-)