Posting this here because I don't think it's currently possible, but just in case - is there any way to exclude items within one of your collection folders from the library? Ie., exclude specific sub directories or files, or maybe a keyword filter, something like that?

This may not be a very common need, but I store various extra data associated with albums along with the albums themselves. Most is harmless (like artwork and log files), but I have a bunch of "enhanced" CDs with the data tracks ripped and saved along with the album, several of which contain various video or audio clips that strawberry picks up as additional audio tracks. More annoyingly, I have stems for a lot of songs and albums, and strawberry happily catalogs those as well. Those albums look like this:

That's 13 variants of the same song. Multiply that by maybe a couple such albums and I end up spending a lot of time just fast-forwarding past these tracks during casual listening.

I know I could zip them or move them to some parallel directory structure so strawberry doesn't see them, but as I mentioned above I strongly prefer to keep all album content together.

If anyone does know of a good way to handle this in strawberry, I'm all ears. Otherwise, would appreciate consideration for some kind of filtering or exclusion feature.

Thanks!

Would it be possible to add library support for DSF files? Strawberry seems to be able to play DSF files via gstreamer just fine, and even read the tags when playing the file:

So playback seems to be about perfect as far as I can tell, but since Strawberry won't index the files and add them to my library it greatly reduces the utility of the DSF files.

Note: I did some searching before posting this and found this thread discussing problems with DSF files apparently being related to taglib, and sure enough I get the following printed to stdout:

22:39:15.844 INFO TagReaderTagLib:205 TagLib hasn't been able to read "/home/user/data/music/Soundtrack/James Horner/Music From The Motion Picture Titanic/06-Take Her To Sea, Mr. Murdoch.dsf" file

But... somehow it's working for me. This is with version 1.0.0 on Gentoo.

I have the same experience as wengels464 - DSF files are not included in my collection, but everything else (FLAC and a handful of MP3s) are added. I know this is super basic, but have you verified that the Collection settings includes the folder(s) you want scanned? I'm sure you likely have, but I can't find anything else that may cause what you've described.

You can try running strawberry --verbose and then running a scan, but the collection scanner doesn't seem to log reliably. Some actions are (for some reason it complains about one missing file previously deleted), but most are not, at least for me. But maybe you'll get lucky?

Edit: If you're using a version older than 1.0.2, also check to make sure you don't have a hidden .nomedia or .nomusic file somewhere in your collection folder. That functionality seems to have been removed from newer versions.

I tried doing both an update scan as well as a full collection rescan, and neither will remove the excluded items from an existing collection. I then tried backing up my strawberry config and database and starting from scratch, and can confirm that it does prevent the scanner from adding the excluded files.

So asking once more, is there a good/easy way to remove files from an existing collection that should've been excluded? I even looked at the database to see if I could delete directly in there, but reluctant to do that because I don't know what kind of references may be in the database that would break if I just delete a bunch of stuff from the songs table.

Not the end of the world if I have to start over, just want to confirm whether there's a better way before going that route. Thanks again.

Is there a way to configure Strawberry to not ignore articles when sorting? Ie., order things as named? If I have an album named "A View from the Top of the World", I'd like it to show up at the top of the list in the As rather than at the bottom in the Vs.

I recently blew away my strawberry configure to workaround some other issues and can't for the life of me find this. I don't recall having this issue previously, but maybe it's always been there and I forgot about it.

I appreciate the option to save play count to the song's tags. I just noticed that when it writes the tag, though, the file's modification time is updated. That's reasonable default behavior since the file is being modified, but for automatic background operations like that I'd rather it preserve the original modification time. That when when looking at my files I can see the last time they were really modified or changed in some meaningful way, vs. just having been played in Strawberry.

Please consider adding an option to preserve modification time for play count updates. Minor request to be sure, but would be appreciated.

Thanks.

@strawberry_nice
Are you talking about jumping to the currently playing track? You can already do that - select "Playlist, Jump to the currently playing track", or just hit Ctrl+J. If that's not what you're trying to do, could you please clarify some more?

Hi, @jonas.

I've been trying to use this feature again and noticed it wasn't working. After some troubleshooting and digging I finally found this mentioned in the 1.0.2 changelog:

Removed features:
* Removed broken "nomedia" / "nomusic" file handling.

I'm sure there was a reason for that, but... what's the alternative? I haven't been able to find any other way to get Strawberry to not add inappropriate files to my music collection. Can you please provide any guidance here?

Thanks.

Is there a way to configure Strawberry to not ignore articles when sorting? Ie., order things as named? If I have an album named "A View from the Top of the World", I'd like it to show up at the top of the list in the As rather than at the bottom in the Vs.

I recently blew away my strawberry configure to workaround some other issues and can't for the life of me find this. I don't recall having this issue previously, but maybe it's always been there and I forgot about it.

Wanted to follow up on this. Since .nomedia support was removed in 1.0.2, is there any way at all to directories within my main music folder from being catalogued by Strawberry?

@rlkeeney You can backup based on checksums or other attributes aside from modification time. Or use a filesystem like ZFS that allows snapshot-based backups, which makes the whole thing irrelevant.

But regardless, this is why I asked for an option to preserve modification time, not making it the default / sole behavior. I'm sure there are a lot of users that prefer the behavior as-is, or have workflows based around the current behavior like you described. But having an option to preserve timestamps for those of us that prefer that behavior would be appreciated.

I appreciate the option to save play count to the song's tags. I just noticed that when it writes the tag, though, the file's modification time is updated. That's reasonable default behavior since the file is being modified, but for automatic background operations like that I'd rather it preserve the original modification time. That when when looking at my files I can see the last time they were really modified or changed in some meaningful way, vs. just having been played in Strawberry.

Please consider adding an option to preserve modification time for play count updates. Minor request to be sure, but would be appreciated.

Thanks.

@strawberry_nice
Are you talking about jumping to the currently playing track? You can already do that - select "Playlist, Jump to the currently playing track", or just hit Ctrl+J. If that's not what you're trying to do, could you please clarify some more?

@wengels464
I tried the CUE sheet idea with my collection. Didn't work. Seems like strawberry simply won't add DSF files to the library, even if it can read the metadata (which, at least on my system, it does perfectly if I try playing a tagged DSF file from my file manager).

Maybe there's some trick that I have yet to discover, though. If you have any luck with your own testing, do please post back here!

Hi, @wengels464.

Sorry to say that this seems to be by design. Have previously brought it up myself: Library support for DSF files. It's a limitation of taglib and the author not wanting to maintain a custom-patched version of taglib for DSF support.

I have the same experience as wengels464 - DSF files are not included in my collection, but everything else (FLAC and a handful of MP3s) are added. I know this is super basic, but have you verified that the Collection settings includes the folder(s) you want scanned? I'm sure you likely have, but I can't find anything else that may cause what you've described.

You can try running strawberry --verbose and then running a scan, but the collection scanner doesn't seem to log reliably. Some actions are (for some reason it complains about one missing file previously deleted), but most are not, at least for me. But maybe you'll get lucky?

Edit: If you're using a version older than 1.0.2, also check to make sure you don't have a hidden .nomedia or .nomusic file somewhere in your collection folder. That functionality seems to have been removed from newer versions.

Hi, @jonas.

I've been trying to use this feature again and noticed it wasn't working. After some troubleshooting and digging I finally found this mentioned in the 1.0.2 changelog:

Removed features:
* Removed broken "nomedia" / "nomusic" file handling.

I'm sure there was a reason for that, but... what's the alternative? I haven't been able to find any other way to get Strawberry to not add inappropriate files to my music collection. Can you please provide any guidance here?

Thanks.

@jonas said in Library support for DSF files:

However we lack contributors so I'm not keen on adding it back and maintain the code outside of taglib as I have limited knowledge of the format

Yeah, that's fair. Disappointing, but understandable. My quest for how to best integrate my highest quality music into my music library continues.