Audio players that access music library as file browser (and see folder structure)

Question

I have a big music library. Nothing special there.

But I very much dislike the way usually music library is displayed in most recommended players, according to Artist/Album/Year/Genre tags, ignoring my folder structure or making it hardly accessible.

The problem is that not all my music is tagged according to genre etc, but all is perfectly ordered by folder structure which takes into account all characteristics handled by tags, as well as many others, which I can change and specify at any time. (I can decide ordering my music by country, inside a sub-category like "baroque music", for example).

The advantage of using folder-structure-display of medialibrary is that all the logical structure is displayed, with all sub-categories, which can be sub-detailed, varied, and changed at wish and be all visible at the same time.

I am looking for some plugins to good players that would provide a solution to this, and I am looking for different solutions to this.

Therefore I'll display as my own answer some solutions that I have already found and welcome other answers with new and better ways to achieve the same purpose.

(Most welcome are of course players that, beside having the capability discussed here, would not lack other elementary features like playlists in tabs, search, and the like.)

Solution 1

guayadeque

We made best experience with guayadeque. We can easily switch between library (tag) view and folder view (see also the nice online manual)

For Lubuntu see this screenshot: Guayadeque - Lubuntu 12.10

Solution 2

Try Exaile:

You can update it from a ppa:

 sudo apt-add-repository ppa:exaile-devel/ppa
 sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install exaile

See: Exaile music player lives on, version 3.3.0 released with many improvements [Ubuntu ppa]

Solution 3

I was in a similar situation some years ago but eventually embraced the tagging paradigm, and never looked back.

I still keep the music in genre and (optionally) sub- and sub-sub-genre folders, but all querying and organisation is done by tags. With a sufficiently powerful searching capability, all my use-cases are solved, and I can now manipulate the library in far more ways than folders alone. Admittedly, though, viewing the hierarchy is much less pretty.

As it happens I use (and now co-develop) Quod Libet for this; directory-based genres can be queried by: ~dirname=/Baroque\/German/ (or whatever) or you could define a sub-genre tag (and automate). More recently, there's also a Filter On Directory plugin - might help some simple use-cases. However, if you have a solid idea for a new type of browser, feel free to raise a feature request...

Comments

[Admin]

Clementine is written in C++, not Java...

[Admin]

cannot tell why in my lubuntu 12.10 i still cannot see the main menus and therefore cannot access view/file browser and so on

[Admin]

did that. the mystery goes on :)

[Takkat]

I then will be of not much further help. Grpahics driver issue seems likely.

[Admin]

thnx,maybe that's why it's not as heavy as i imagined it would be, i'll correct

[Admin]

in qmmp 1.3.1 fixed current track text color in the qsui plugin (the simple interface): better visibility with current track colored not just bold.