Stupid Question I know...

[computerman]

... but is it possible to run LMS without any SQL at all? Or at least without it indexing anything... there's absolutely no point as I never use any of the search / genre facilities, I purely navigate a folder structure and that's it.

I started with original SliMP3 devices, so have been running LMS in all its variations with around a dozen hardware players for many years now, and the only problems I've ever had are database related... if I can do without it, why not? The same machine I use to run LMS also runs an NFS sharing device to stream multi-room HiDef video, and Serve To Me, to stream video (and the same audio that LMS streams) to my IOS devices... must be possible...

[JJZolx]

No, it's not possible. The library must be indexed, not only to read the metadata from tags, but to determine things like file codecs, bit depths, sample rates, and byte offsets of audio data within the file. All things that are necessary for playing the file, beyond just information that can be searched and displayed.

There had been some talk by the developers quite a while ago about not requiring the library indexing and then doing this scanning of the file on the fly. Among other things, it would make it possible to navigate to a temporary folder containing music files and listen to them without actually adding them to the library. I don't think anyone ever looked into it, though. Right now, just about everything in how the server operates revolves around using data from the database.

[computerman]

Oh well... worth a try I suppose! I wonder if I removed all the tag information...