So I’m testing Symfonium, and my need is because my music and my entire music library are on pCloud.
So it works very well on mobile, and I find the interface decent.
However, on Android Auto, I haven’t found a way to navigate through my folders and subfolders where my music is stored.
I have an organization by folders and subfolders to store my music that I know well and have been using for years.
When I’m on Android Auto, I don’t have the folder and subfolder view, which is really problematic.
Since not all of my music is necessarily correctly tagged, it doesn’t help me at all to have to search for albums or artists, and I would like to know how, therefore, on Android Auto in the Symfonium interface, I can have access to the folders and subfolders (located on pCloud in my case) to be able to choose exactly which album I want to listen to.
Regards
Logs:
Upload description: It is an UI issue no logs are needed
Navigating via folders is indeed more powerful than any tagging system. While I understand your point, I have found that there are at least two similar features in the AA UI, and I think replacing one of these with a folder exploration option would be helpful for many other users like me who keep their music organized in folders. For me, the priority is privacy and ease of use, and I don’t mind the price of the app if it achieves that. Organizing music into folders allows me to access tracks in just a couple of clicks, which is the most efficient method for my needs. Can you name any other app that can do that fine in AA ? Regards.
Navigating via folders is indeed more powerful than any tagging system
This is absolutely false, this is just an habit and not using proper tags.
A folder hierarchy is limited by the fact that it’s a simple tree that can only represent one chosen hierarchy.
No multi genres, no multi artists, no multiple years, moods and so many other multi directional hierarchy that allows so much more interesting ways to navigate your music.
And no there’s no infinite browsing feature in AA currently as it’s not allowed by Google rules, so no feature to replace.
I know this one has been a while, but I just wanted to add something that might be helpful for other users.
I also have been sorting by folders for many years. My, sort of, hack around it was to use a bulk tagging utility to put the folder name into the genre field.
For example a folder called 80s retro just got all the genre tags inside changed to 80s retro.
Another example would be in my DJ tunes folder I have sub folders called Warm Up, etc, - again, just made the folder title the genre tag.
If you have all your genres meticulously set, then you could just use a different tag field, like mood, or whatever it doesn’t really matter. This way you can still browse through your folders like you have been, but using tags/ library instead.
And to be honest, this works way better than my old workflow. I can just dump a bunch of tunes from my master collection onto a random stick, and I can still sort by ‘folder’ (its really just a tag) despite there being only a single directory.
This was the most frictionless way I could think of to move past my old ways, which were actually really restricting me.
My digital library grew up with iTunes, where I was always browsing by genre, then artist. When I started listening to music in the car (in times where you could only browse through folders in car hifi devices), I exported my library so that it would be sorted into folders in the exact same way; so first folder hierarchy genres, second artists. When Symfonium development started (I was here from the beginning), I pushed Tolriq to make that way of navigation available again, although it seems not as many people use it as I thought.
I still often navigate the library that way, but also use other ways now like searching (is sometimes faster than clicking genre, scrolling to the artist, clicking the artist, scrolling to the album, clicking the album) and the shortcuts to last added and last played albums. As Tolriq said before, we get used to certain patterns, but it makes sense to look into and adopt new ones from time to time.
So adopting the folder structure into tags is a good idea to not throw away old habits and at the same time be able to look into new options.