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by anon4 3897 days ago
One thing I would love to see is a folder-based music view like you have artist/album views.

I don't tag my songs, I just organise them in folders about three levels deep. What I'd like to see is a folder tree of my music folder on the left and all the files in that folder, plus all subfolders recursively, on the right. The only player I remember getting this right was amarok (now clementine). I've never once in my life ever wanted my songs listed by album or artist. I have my file manager to organise my files and they're already organised. It's really silly to ask me to organise them again in a different way that doesn't really fit my organisational style.

4 comments

Moc does that. If like me you're not a music player guy you can use mplayer in slave mode, reading from a playlist created with `find | sort`. I made a script to do that and some other stuff. https://gist.github.com/afarah1/e8cbafaf1d9d8029c6ca
Ooh, thanks. I did pretty much the same as you (but in perl) for a while and gave up on it, since I decided like having a UI to my music player.
Ditto - automatic organisation by metadata might be nice if metadata wasn't universally inconsistent and incomplete. I tried manually fixing my whole library and it was nice for a couple of weeks, but there's so much ongoing maintainence overhead that OS-level folders are the only thing I bother with any more :(
one possibility might be to let beets handle all the music organization while cmus just leverages that to provide different views on that data using beets.

just a separation of concerns really...

The metadata doesn't even reflect the way I think about music. And what do you do with movie OSTs, which are by ten different artists and some are songs from other albums? It's just madness.
I use beets for tagging, and it has no trouble with OSTs. It sets a different tag for Album artist and Track artist, and cmus uses the Album artist. Most soundtracks of the type you mention are under <Various Artists>.

I'm different from most people in that nearly all of my music collection is complete albums, so if that's not the case, then I could see how a file/folder layout would work better, and the artist/album view is more full-featured than the file-browser view.

[edit] Also as far as I can tell, there's no way to filter based off of path (only filename) which might also be a good way if you prefer directory based organization.

I tag my music through MusicBrainz (https://musicbrainz.org/) and I generally don't have to worry about metadata anymore. I generally try to correct anything I find that's wrong. abcde + picard + ncmpcpp.
MOC does that