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Thursday, November 12, 2009

General rules of organizing music files into libraries?

 

I was trying to organize folders with mp3 files on my PC in a logical tree structure. Something like that

Artist_1
  FolderWithSongs_1
    song1.mp3
    song2.mp3
  Folder_2
    SubFolder_3
      song3.mp3
      song4.mp3
    Subfolder_4

Event_3
  Artist_2
    song10.mp3
    song11.mp3
  Artist_55

. . . .

Sometimes, there are several Albums belonging to the same Artist.
Sometimes there is an Event (Concert) on which several Artists perform.
It's OK to have two folders with the same name located in different nodes of hierarchy.

Such hierarchical structure works well on a PC, but on Android device it is quite different.

If I understand it correctly, Android treats each folder as an album. It also recognizes tags of mp3 files and reads album and other information from those tags. And obviously, Music players on Android do not present music library as a hierarchical structure (a tree). Instead it looks like a flat list of albums.
As a result,a nice and complicated hierarchy of folders with mp3 files, set on my PC + tag information embedded into mp3 files create a mess on Android, with many albums basically pointing to the same songs.
Also, having two folders (albums?) with the same name presents a problem - how to distinguish them?

I suspect that on Android I should use some flat folder structure (no folders inside other folders)...
Should folder names always be the same as names of albums contained in them? MediaMonkey seems to suggest folder names which are combinations of album names + artist names.

If folder structure in a media library on PC is hierarchical and different from a flat folder structure on Android device, how to synchronize them?

Basically, are there general rules of organizing music files into libraries, so that it is easy and convenient to use on Android (and other portable devices? I cannot figure it out :(

Wednesday, November 4, 2009

A problem with Music Player on Android Dev Phone 1: not indexing mp3 files

 

I found a solution for this Android bug on a Russian-speaking Google Wave devoted to Android! By the way, I encourage everybody to join Google Wave ASAP (no, I already used all my invitations).
A solution, or should I say - a workaround? - is to use Meridian Player http://sites.google.com/site/eternalsandbox/Home instead of Android's own Music Player. Meridian Player allows to forcibly re-scan media files.
As I was told on Meridian's forum, "Yes, it is an Android's media scanner issue, and I also don't know what's the actual behavior of the auto scanning. Before 1.1 it will do a full scan each time replugging SD card, but now it does not. Even manually invoke (by Meridian) sometimes fail...Hope they can fix this soon."
http://groups.google.com/group/meridian_android/browse_thread/thread/d3da70a557f1d545?hl=en

I wonder why Meridian developers know that, while Google Android developers do not.