Music library management

This week's release adds in pagination for the web UI. I added this in for two reasons.

First, a customer was experiencing memory problems because his library was so large that bliss was running out of memory just rendering the Web page! So I fixed that by breaking the UI into pages of twelve albums per page, with links to move left and right.

The second reason is that it makes the browsing view easier to navigate and less overwhelming.

I have a feeling some users may want to be able to view more than twelve albums at once. If so, add the suggestion to the bliss UserVoice page!

The new release is available at the download page.

This isn't about music library management per se, but it is about bliss. I just uploaded a customer/user testimonial page with some of the quotes from customers and users that I have gathered so far. Some of the praise has really put a smile on my face. Striving for a clean, correct, consistent digital music library seems to be a passion shared by many people!

I also created a couple of Delicious tags for bliss - bliss_press and bliss_testimonial.

Thanks for everyone's feedback!

This week's release fixes a problem where the cost, in terms of number of fixes, was being counted a little, er, 'eagerly' when performing manual changes.

It can be downloaded, as usual, from http://www.blisshq.com/download.html.

The recent blog posts may have hinted at this, but I've also been doing some background work on file organisation compliancy. This allows you to specify, in a rule, how your music files should be organised and it will tell you when they are uncompliant against that rule and, optionally, will automatically move/rename/whatever your files to make it compliant again!

Storing music in FLAC format is an excellent choice. It's higher quality than MP3 and, importantly, is 'lossless' which means you can always convert it to another format. Not all players support it though, so sometimes you need to have your same music in a different format. How do you accomplish this while not wasting time or storage space? mp3fs is a fully automatic and storage efficient way of keeping a copy of your FLAC library in MP3 format.

What are the other options for converting from FLAC to MP3? First, it can be done manually on a file by file or bulk basis. Some converters (or 'transcoders') work with a GUI while some work on the command line. Examples of both are dBpoweramp Music Converter and flac2mp3.

There are two problems with the manual approaches:

1. They have to be run each time your music library changes, because they are manual. This can be mitigated by running the job periodically
   
2. They use more storage space, because a separate copy of your FLACs in MP3 format are kept

Instead, on my Linux home server, I use mp3fs. mp3fs represents your FLAC folders as MP3 folders. You simply point mp3fs at your FLAC directory and tell it where the resulting MP3 files should end up. No MP3 files are created as such, it just looks like they are.

First decide where you want your mp3s to be stored. Let's say you want them stored in /mnt/music/mp3. This should be an empty directory. Now, choose your FLAC directory. Let's say this is /mnt/music/flac:

gravelld@gravelld-laptop:~$ ls /mnt/music/flac
Alison_Balsom    Mint Royale    Oasis     Suede                  Various
Louis_Armstrong  Nelly_Furtado  Pendulum  The_Chemical_Brothers

Meanwhile:

gravelld@gravelld-laptop:~$ ls /mnt/music/mp3
gravelld@gravelld-laptop:~$

Nothing in there yet! So, let's weave some mp3fs magic:

sudo mp3fs /mnt/music/flac,192 /mnt/music/mp3

Now:

gravelld@gravelld-laptop:~$ ls /mnt/music/mp3
Alison_Balsom    Mint Royale    Oasis     Suede                  Various
Louis_Armstrong  Nelly_Furtado  Pendulum  The_Chemical_Brothers

And interestingly:

gravelld@gravelld-laptop:~$ sudo ls /mnt/music/mp3/Oasis/Definitely\ Maybe
01-Rock 'N' Roll Star.mp3  07-Bring It On Down.mp3
02-Shakermaker.mp3         08-Cigarettes & Alcohol.mp3
03-Live Forever.mp3        09-Digsy's Dinner.mp3
04-Up In The Sky.mp3       10-Slide Away.mp3
05-Columbia.mp3            11-Married With Children.mp3
06-Supersonic.mp3          cover.jpg

These are FLAC files stored in the FLAC directory, but now they appear to be MP3 files too. The important bit here is that these MP3 files are not actually stored on the hard disk. Rather, each time you access the MP3 directory or files therein, mp3fs mimics the directory structure or creates the MP3s on-the-fly. This means:

1. You don't need to tell mp3fs when the music library has changed
2. There's no extra storage space required to store your MP3 mirror of your FLAC files

Some people say "storage is cheap". I agree, but your time isn't. Storing two separate trees of music is duplication and therefore imposes a management cost. It's not just adding music either, it's deleting it and modifying it too that would, with a manual solution, require a rebuild of your MP3s.

That is how I mirror my FLACs to MP3s on my Linux home server, and I haven't had to think about it again since.

The most obvious changes in this week's release are bug fixes, but in the background I've begun work on a file organisation rule (hence the recent thoughts about how to organise music files!).

The first bug fix was annoying glitch in the way IE8 rendered new albums on a blank page - it would render them all in one column. This is now fixed.

I also improved the detection of multiple instances of bliss running in Windows 7. Before there was opportunity to launch multiple versions.

Finally, I improved the recognition of 'album directories'. Before, if the artist name was in the directory name in addition to the album name, the directory would not be considered an album directory. It does now.

The new release is available, as ever, at http://www.blisshq.com/download.html

Don't use the genre of your music as a basis to organise your music files. Genre is inherently wholly, ambiguous and subject to change. As such, it does not make a good candidate for organising music files and directories.

I can see why some digital music lovers include genre information in their music file structures. Genre is interesting, it's a way of categorising music that makes sense for choosing playlists. To this end, music playing software and hardware allows you to browse your music library by genre. So why shouldn't you organise files by genre too?

The trouble is that file and directory structures don't lend themselves to structures where the names may change. Genre, because it's inherently wholly and ambiguous is one of the more frequently altered aspect of music meta-data. Music players often identify music by the file path of the music. Changing the file path when you decide to change the genre may reset information about the music stored in the music player, such as play counts, ratings and more.

It's important that meta-data communicated in your file and directory structures are the same as the data within your embedded music tags, give or take file system limitations. This means that when the genre for your music changes it should change both the tags and anywhere else the genre is communicated. If genre is in your file structure, this means changing your file structure too.

You may also wish to assign multiple genres to tracks and albums in your music library. This is perfectly possible and a valid thing to do using tags within the music files. However, because file structures are hierarchical, you can only pick one genre to organise by. Remembering why your chose the one-you-did is difficult, and leaves the potential for further problems at a later date.

So how should music files be organised? I think some level of categorisation is important, because music file organisation is often needed as a fallback when performing some administration tasks and also for music players that are incompatible with your music tags. We need to choose music meta-data that is better suited to use in file structures. This is meta-data that is less subject to change.

I choose to organise files within artist/album directory structures. These data, specifically the ALBUM_ARTIST and ALBUM_NAME tags, generally do not chage and the structure is layered enough to be sortable and navigable. All other meta-data such as genre, year, style and mood are stored within the music files themselves so that I can use them inside my music players.

And that is why you shouldn't use genre in your music file/directory structures.

Thanks to feverblue for the image used at the top of this blog post

A few minor-ish bug fixes this week.

I introduced the 'why?' link to the album grid a few weeks ago. Before, when revealing the details of what made an album compliant, the details inherited the tick or cross icon from the overall compliancy. Now, the tick or cross is related to the detail. Generally speaking, if just one detail has a cross (is uncompliant) then the whole album is.

I also did some work to improve the startup experience for VortexBox users using bliss. VortexBox is a home jukebox appliance. Andrew at VortexBox has set bliss up as a beta integration. With just a couple of commands you can add bliss to your VortexBox, and have it managing its album art. Read more here and here.

The new versions are available in the usual place!