I’d love to have images displayed instead of the default folder icon in the file browser, like Poweramp does. The application could select the first image from all audio files in the folder (recursively, if needed).
Problem solved:
Visuals like this are extremely helpful, they allow one to select the desired folder more quickly. It would also improve the looks.
Brought benefits:
It would be nice to have for users who primarly listen through the file browser.
Other application solutions:
As already mentioned Poweramp implements this in its file browser view.
Well, Symfonium displays images for the songs in your library. I’m not sure how it does that (or whether it does that at all when using a server instead of the local library) as I don’t utilize the network features, but I don’t see how folder images would be significantly different from song images in this regard. Showing images for tracks would also involve an absurd amount of requests if implemented naively.
But assuming you have the images for the individual tracks cached, there’s no need for any additional requests to show the folder images. Simply load the image of the first track in the folder.
Simply And how do you think I can get the track in the folder ? It needs to request the content of that folder to the provider.
So if you open a folder with 500 folders, it requires 500 requests to the server to get the data.
Alright. But let’s say I open a folder in the files browser which contains 500 files. What does Symfonium do in that case? Would it retrieve the cached images of the files, and if there are none request them from the server?
If that’s the case then I still don’t understand why implementing this would be different. Even if you don’t cache the directory structure you can still cache the folder images after retrieving them.
P.S. I really don’t want to seem combative. It’s just one of those features that would be really awesome to have.
Also, the reason why I like using the files browser is because I have my own way I like to organize my music. The only application I know that is powerful enough to properly group the tracks in the UI without having to actually change the directory structure is musicbee, which is what I use on my desktop. On my phone I sync the “grouped” folder structure to retain that information, but if I can’t browse it quickly then there’s no point…
Well, I think folder images would be a great feature on its own since it would speed up navigation. Besides, you can’t satisfy everyone’s different needs for organization which is why the file browser will probably remain in use.
What I have is as follows: Several folders containing the “supergenre” (really just a single letter in my case). In each of those folders I have the albums belonging to that category. I know you can create a smart playlist which will contain all tracks of a particular category by including tracks which have e.g. /A/ in their path, but the result will be a list of tracks rather than a grid or list of albums.
Oh wow, I have completely missed the “Album smart playlist” button on the side.
Still annoying that clicking an album will just play it rather than open it though, I have to always select Go to album in the three dot menu. I don’t really want a “playlist”, I just want my files arranged in a particular way. Still, that’s already great!
And how do you think I can get the track in the folder ? It needs to request the content of that folder to the provider.
I wonder why I did not thought about that 