Meridian Unplugged - Powered by MrTechGuy.co.uk Forums Discussion HiFi & HT Chat Managing multiple versions of music files

All,

Little bit of self promotion. I've been working on an utility for a while which is about ready for public consumption and you might find interesting.

The basic idea is you already have all of your music files stored somewhere. Perhaps all under one directory tree, perhaps under several. Based on that collection of content you can then produce one or more "Views".

Each View is a directory under which is created an alternative presentation of your collection. A really simple View is just all of the different content directories merged into one directory tree. But these aren't file copies (which would waste space) but links back to the original files.

Where it gets a bit more interesting is a View can show a different version of the files. For example, you can define a View where all the files are in MP3 format. This View will link back to the original mp3s where it can or transcode into MP3 format (preserving all the tags and images etc.) where it can't.

Extending that, the View can be set to be in MP3 format and only include tracks by particular artists. That then gives a directory structure ready to be synchronised with a portable device.

You can also apply arbitary processing. I have a View which is forced to be FLAC or MP3, but for certain artists and labels (and where the original file is in a lossless format) the track will be upsampled using VirusKiller's sox filters.

Compared to doing this live in foobar/Squeezebox Sever you're using space to store the copies but saving on playback processing cost, and it also works for players without live filter support. Plus, it's better than doing the conversions manually as if you add or change any files you just have to run the View processor again and everything gets updated.

There's more you can do too; increasingly complicated logic to include/exclude files, having a different directory structure and filename in the View to the original, applying text processing to tags etc.

The actual View processor is called musview and it's here:
http://www.codebunny.org/coding/musutil/index.html

But most of the configuration is in the associated Audio::BunnyMusicFile project. I'm afraid it's not as simple as double-clicking setup.exe but if you follow through the Getting Started section it shouldn't be too bad:
http://www.codebunny.org/coding/audio-bunnymusicfile/manual/index.html

Disclaimers: I've tested on OpenBSD and Win 7. It is still new, so bugs very likely. Please make sure you've backed up your files as if you configure it pathologically it will delete stuff it's not supposed to.

Questions, feedback welcome here or PM/email etc.

Duncan

I wish you well. Save me the effort of carrying on with the Samba server and converting it to do the same.

I had started on basically a proxy server for media that could transcode between formats but so far, never got past playing with the Samba source code. It didn't matter where files were stored and in what format, the proxy server simply amalgamated them into file shares that would be accessible from any SMB/Cifs device in whatever format the share was configured as. Transcoding, upsampling and theoretically apodising would happen in (near) real time, caching popular files if needed. It would later be enhanced to do same with internet feeds, allowing any internet feed to be seen by any SMB/Cifs aware device, including Video feeds.