My disk is full and all of it is music, so I'm trying to move the stuff I listen to least to an external drive. Now I need to find a nice way to incorporate this scheme into foobar
It helps a lot that foobar retains in its index files that are currently offline. This way they can still be searched.
It would be practical, however, to be able to mark files that are currently unavailable using some title formatting. Also, even if the external drive is plugged in, it would be nice to mark which files are residing on a removable medium.
Any thoughts on how to do those two things?
Extracting the drive letter from the path is one solution, but not very dynamic. Another thing is the sorting of my library - the tracks on the external harddrive appear at the bottom when I browse my library using Facets and EsPlaylist, but I can't see that path is used anywhere for sorting... It would be optimal if I were able to split up single albums (with the popular songs on the internal) but still have all the songs shown together as one album.
Thanks for your input!
You can set up a filter using a code like this:
$left(%path%,3)
What is not so dynamic about this? I suppose Facets put an 'All' toggle on top of each filter. If an album is split between two drives, just use that.
Maybe, by dynamic, OP means something like:
$if($strstr(%path%,C:\),LOCAL,EXTERNAL)
This could be used in a new column to mark tracks individually. It could also be used to help create a new view in Album list where selecting "All music" would show all tracks (sorted correctly, regardless of location), but also leaving OP the option of selecting "LOCAL" or "EXTERNAL" as a way to show only those tracks in their respective location.
As for the sorting, Facets has a box in its preferences to define how it sorts. It's likely to be %path_sort% currently. Changing that to something akin to:
%album artist% - %date% - %album% - %discnumber% - %tracknumber% - %title%
might help achieve what you want OP.
You'll likely want to change the sort settings under Shell Integration to something similar to the above sort as well.
Thanks for your answers.
The reason I think extracting the drive letter is not very dynamic is that one has to code in statically which drive letters belong to which category. It would be nice to have a dynamic method of determining wether a file resides on an internal drive, an external drive, or even on a network drive.
Also, the most important part of my question is determining which files are offline. For instance, if I would like to add a star before each song title for files that are currently unavailable (instead of trying to play it and having the song skipped).
I'm using the old version of Facets since I must consider the new one bloatware for my purpose (I use the exquisite EsPlaylist instead), and I don't see any option for sorting - is it just me?
BenB's variation does exactly that. The internal drive letters are doubtful to ever change. Everything else will be labeled under 'External'. If you want to separate them, you could just put your music into '\network\' and '\external\' root folders on the corresponding drives and make a filter based on that. Though it is hardly different than just using drive letters in my opinion.
Marking files in playlists can be done with the same code as well (just change 'EXTERNAL' to a star or whatever and 'LOCAL' to nothing). But again, simply using the filter should immediately sort out every potential file. (And the media library will do it for you eventually anyway.)
Please give me a little credit and don't write any more posts pointing out obvious stuff... About using drive letters as an indicator, it's still not a very dynamic solution; I might create more internal partitions, move my foobar to another machine and so on... There are no guarantees that letters C and D are internal, E to V are external and W to Z are network drives. But I guess it's the only method available.
I'm still very interested in seeing some title formatting that will tell me wether a file is currrently online/available or wether it resides in a location that is disconnected. Foobar retains files in its database even if their current location is unavailable (which is a good thing).
Not possible. Previous discussion here (http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=92995) and here (http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=92647).