browse by directory

[rpedde]

@tgor wrote:

Am I not understanding something with that support?

Yes.

Each one of those servers has a different protocol to access it. To make mt-daapd/firefly be able to browse by directory would require changing the protocol (doable), but if the protocol changes, it would have to be changed on the client, too.

Either that, or I could implement the same kind of server protocol that twonky et. al. do — upnp. that’s on my roadmap, but upnp is kind of suckish (imho), and I like the speed of rsp, so I’d prefer to do it that way.

So the “right” way would require changes on the roku side, and the “wrong” way isn’t on my near-term roadmap.

— Ron

[batka]

Hi All!
I came up with this theme at the Roku forum also, here:
http://forums.rokulabs.com/viewtopic.php?t=7671&start=15

My reasons are written in that thread. In short, I don’t use tags. “Browse by folder” feature = playing files without tags in my understanding.

My idea might be dumb, but I put it here, maybe Ron could consider it. And correct me if I’m wrong.
Maybe you should just bypass the current protocol, so that there would no need to change the protocol to support browsing by folder/file (since Soundbridge currently don’t have native browse by folder feature). The idea is that you should just emulate the tag infos for the Roku, I mean, the folder name (which contains the flac files, an album tipically) could be treated as Album title (even it’s not), and individual file names as song titles. All the other “tag infos” would be empty. And then at the Soundbridge, we could browse in the “Album” section.

I see two problem though:
– of course, together with real tags, would mess up the listing/library. So I guess it is only possible if the normal real tag method would be disabled in this case. Maybe you could make an option in the config file to enable this (and disable tag method at the same time). I certainly would be happy about such a feature.
– some problems may come related to multiple level directories… What if a folder name is like “artist – album – year”, and that includes two subdirectories, like “Disc 1” and “Disc 2”. In that case what would be the displayed folder name, Disc 1? I guess yes, it still would be better than nothing.

Thanks in advance!
Great work!

[rpedde]

@batka wrote:

Maybe you should just bypass the current protocol, so that there would no need to change the protocol to support browsing by folder/file (since Soundbridge currently don’t have native browse by folder feature). The idea is that you should just emulate the tag infos for the Roku, I mean, the folder name (which contains the flac files, an album tipically) could be treated as Album title (even it’s not), and individual file names as song titles. All the other “tag infos” would be empty. And then at the Soundbridge, we could browse in the “Album” section.

Right, plus, everyone tags stuff different ways. I use: Artist/Year/Album/Track – Name.mp3

So there would have to be some kind of configuration for choosing all that stuff. But then someone would want to have files in a “various artists” folder get tagged as a compilation, etc, etc.

Best way, I think, is to export a scripting interface so that every time a song is indexed, the script has a chance to edit the tags based on info like file path, etc.

That’s probably nearer term than UPnP. I hope in the next week (I have the week off) to start on the scripting interface. We’ll see how far it gets.

— Ron

[batka]

@rpedde wrote:

Best way, I think, is to export a scripting interface so that every time a song is indexed, the script has a chance to edit the tags based on info like file path, etc.

That’s probably nearer term than UPnP. I hope in the next week (I have the week off) to start on the scripting interface. We’ll see how far it gets.

— Ron

Yeah thanks really for your answer. I’m not sure if I understand that completely :D, but thanks indeed for your generous works!

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