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Topic: Media Library & Album List (Panel) (Read 4972 times) previous topic - next topic
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Media Library & Album List (Panel)

This features work well, but could foobar also support option not to scan/index metadata and tracks when creating library?

Or maybe other way around and just be able to choose whether to ignore them in Album List (Panel) options..

Something that would allow to create sole album list (or rather directory list), basically reducing the "View" option to "directory structure" or %directoryname% (name of the directory the selected file type is in).

This would make foobar and album list work much faster for people who don't want/need to search/sort using extracted metadata. And for very big album collections there is really no other choice, because amount of indexed metadata and tracks is mostly just too great to handle easily.

I'm not sure if this is technically possible, but I'd imagine normal Album List "double-click action" can work with directory album-list same way as using "Play in foobar2000" from a context menu.

I have tried to achieve this with plugins but none could fully replace album list (panel) with its sorting options (%directoryname%) and integrated filter/search support, so I figured it's more of an inbuilt / main application issue.

Media Library & Album List (Panel)

Reply #1 –
There's already a view by folder structure option. If you specifically want a double level structure as 'folder containing the song \ song' you can use a syntax such as '$directory(%path%)|%filename%'.

I strongly disagree that folder structure is somehow the only way to handle large libraries, quite the contrary, actually. You either used the wrong tools, used them poorly or your tags need to be cleaned up and properly organized.

I'd suggest checking out the library viewer component called Facets, which is a lot more powerful utility than Album list that should serve you well in handling larger libraries (via tags, if you want to keep your sanity).

Media Library & Album List (Panel)

Reply #2 –
View options or tags itself are not the problem here.

Simply said, sheer combined size of meta-* files (200MB) and tree file (73MB) of my library makes Search/Filter too slow to work on my system. (and also foobar's startup very slow, even with "Rescan on startup" and "Monitoring" of the library disabled)

I realize it is quite unusual but I don't need/want default "Media Library" Search to look through all the metadata and tracks, only directory names. As far as I know it (Search) cannot be configured to work that way.

That's why an ideal solution would be choice not to index metadata/tracks at all (or option to select what should be indexed), since I do not really need them and more importantly, their amount makes foobar too slow/unusable (which is understandable).

I have tried Facets, it's not completely what I need, but to be honest I'm not absolutely sure there is no plugin that can already do what I want, so here are some screenshots of what I have in mind,



             

Media Library & Album List (Panel)

Reply #3 –
Sounds very counter-productive for any component with database-backed search function to not rely on the one provided by foobar itself already, so you are more than likely out of luck. Your second best bet is to look for search engine alternatives as separate programs and rely on those, if you really want to go down that route.

Out of curiosity though, how big is your library? Size certainly has an effect on performance, but I have not heard anyone saying before that they could flatout not use foobar because of that. How much titleformatting are you using in your panels? Did you notice any performance gain with other library viewers (last time I checked, the Columns UI version of Album list can become painfully slow with a large library, can't say if the DUI version is better or worse)? Are you using ~1.3 or newer foobar (which is I think when the new caching method was introduced, which should help the performance with larger libraries)? Do you keep your tags clean and organized?

Media Library & Album List (Panel)

Reply #4 –
Quote from: tor11 on
That's why an ideal solution would be choice not to index metadata/tracks at all (or option to select what should be indexed)


Look at LargeFieldsConfig.txt file.

Media Library & Album List (Panel)

Reply #5 –
Quote from: Daeron on
Your second best bet is to look for search engine alternatives as separate programs and rely on those, if you really want to go down that route.
That's what I wanted to avoid.
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Out of curiosity though, how big is your library? Size certainly has an effect on performance, but I have not heard anyone saying before that they could flatout not use foobar because of that.
Somewhere up to 75k albums/directories. I know it may seem strange but the reason I'm asking for the solution is that foobar can actually somewhat handle it, albeit start-up time is long and it takes longer time to use Search/Filter than it is comfortable. I'm looking for ways how to optimize it for this purpose, also foobar uses about 850MB of memory right after start so it's (Media Library) obviously not built to be used this way.
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How much titleformatting are you using in your panels?
None, only defaults. I use %directoryname% for View as you can see in screenshots.
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Did you notice any performance gain with other library viewers (last time I checked, the Columns UI version of Album list can become painfully slow with a large library, can't say if the DUI version is better or worse)?
I haven't noticed any significant differences between CUI and DUI versions. Considering other library viewers and also Album list, I specifically need something working as a panel with simple search, basically same way the album list panel works which you can see in screenshot. That quite limits number of usable plugins..
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Are you using ~1.3 or newer foobar (which is I think when the new caching method was introduced, which should help the performance with larger libraries)? Do you keep your tags clean and organized?
Yes, latest version and no problem with tags.

Quote from: lvqcl on
Look at LargeFieldsConfig.txt file.
Thank you, that was worth a try, I limited metadata to tracknumber, artist and title, but performance was still too poor. I suspect that tree file alone, with all of the directories content, is too big, so my idea of getting around metadata was probably not gonna help anyway .. and media library feature was simply not designed to work with this kind of data.

What I need is some plugin which can be used to display pure directory list (in a way %directoryname% works, not the real tree view) and which could be added as a panel with basic search/filter (same as with album list panel). I think this should be simple enough to work reasonably well/fast.

Quote from: Daeron link=msg=0 date=
Sounds very counter-productive for any component with database-backed search function to not rely on the one provided by foobar itself already, so you are more than likely out of luck.
I know, unfortunately.

Media Library & Album List (Panel)

Reply #6 –
Too bad there is no plugin replacing default media library with an SQLite backed library, for example.

Media Library & Album List (Panel)

Reply #7 –
Did you try SQL Tree?
 

Media Library & Album List (Panel)

Reply #8 –
I was just looking at it before I posted, but from what I have seen it is just media library viewer, not really the same thing, I'm not 100% sure though.