How to add custom sources to GNOME Music Player?

Question

I just upgraded to GNOME 3.12 (running Ubuntu GNOME 14.04 LTS) and I love the Music Player that comes with it. The problem I have, is that my music is located on a NAS, so its not in the default directory that the player expects it to be. I have looked through all options within the player, but I had no luck defining a custom location for my music.

Does anybody know how to adjust those settings?

Solution 1

It seems to utilise 'Tracker' to find your music.

Open the "tracker-preferences" application, navigate to the 'Locations' tab, and add the location of your music. Apply the changes and close the window.

Tracker should immediately start scanning the new folders. You can follow this progress with tracker-control -f

Solution 2

First edit ~/.config/user-dirs.dirs so as to change the music folder to the path of the desired folder.

You can use the following command:

gedit ~/.config/user-dirs.dirs`

For example, if your music resides in /home/user/Dropbox/music you will change the file to look like this:

XDG_MUSIC_DIR=$HOME/Dropbox/music

After that, install tracker-gui through the following command:

sudo apt-get install tracker-gui

Then open Tracker by typing the following in the terminal:

tracker-preferences 

Go to the "Locations" tab and add the location to the tracker by clicking the + sign and navigating to your music folder.

Select it and click Apply.

Comments

[Severin]

Thanks for the quick reply. There is no app called "tracker" on my installation. Is it something I have to add manually?

[Tobias]

It should be installed. Try running sudo apt-get install tracker That should tell you it's already installed (or install it). What happened when you ran tracker-preferences?

[Severin]

The program 'tracker-preferences' is currently not installed. You can install it by typing: sudo apt-get install tracker-gui

[Tobias]

I presume it works after installing tracker-gui then?

[Severin]

Yes, although it seems to crash randomly once in a while. Thx!