I am running Mopidy on a Raspberry Pi 4 and I’m using a variety of clients to access it. I’m using mostly Iris via web connections over my LAN and also Argos running on my laptop, also via the LAN.
All my music is stored locally in a hierarchical directory structure with major genres at the top and (mostly) albums in individual directories at the bottom.
I’m puzzled by what Mopidy regards as albums, no albums at all appear on my system, even though in reality nearly all of my bottom level directories are albums. Some (but by no means all) of my album directories also have playlist (.m3u) files in them but Mopidy doesn’t seem to do anything useful with them either.
Is there any way of creating what Mopidy sees as albums from my music files? I’m sort of aware that the Mopidy-Local extension might help but I’d like to be sure that it will be useful before installing and exploring that.
Thanks for any help and insights that anyone can offer.
Mopidy-Local and Mopidy-File both use the ID3 metadata embedded in each File. Specifically the album tags. If those are missing/incomplete/inconsistent then it’s not going to work.
Mopidy-Local completely ignores your filesystem layout and uses only the metadata. Mopidy-File works with a sort of hybrid scheme, dealing with only the tracks in a given folder at a time and using only their metadata. It’s behaviour is therefore dependent on your folder structure.
Normally people want Mopidy-Local. It used to be bundled with Mopidy but was made separate in the process of merging in many improvements from the community. Mopidy-File was developed with the specific use case of supporting removable storage devices, where a persistent metatdata database wasn’t available. It does have other uses but that purpose explains why it works the way it does.
Mopidy-Local and Mopidy-File both use the ID3 metadata embedded in each
File. Specifically the album tags. If those are
missing/incomplete/inconsistent then it’s not going to work.
Well they look OK to me using the Troubleshooting information you give
below. For example I tried looking at a directory which contains a
Miles Davis album and I see things like the following:-
uri
file:///home/chris/music/jazz/Miles%20Davis%20-%20Porgy%20And%20Bess/05%20-%20Summertime.flac
mime None
duration 201000
playable True
seekable True
tags
artist ['Miles Davis']
title ['Summertime']
track-number [5]
album ['Porgy And Bess']
audio-codec ['Free Lossless Audio Codec (FLAC)']
Mopidy-Local completely ignores your filesystem layout and uses only
the metadata. Mopidy-File works with a sort of hybrid scheme, dealing
with only the tracks in a given folder at a time and using only their
metadata. It’s behaviour is therefore dependent on your folder
structure.
All of the tracks in the same folder return the same album name (I
grep’ed for it).
Normally people want Mopidy-Local. It used to be bundled with Mopidy
but was made separate in the process of merging in many improvements
from the community. Mopidy-File was developed with the specific use
case of supporting removable storage devices, where a persistent
metatdata database wasn’t available. It does have other uses but that
purpose explains why it works the way it does.
You can see what metadata is extracted for a track as detailed by
[2]Troubleshooting — Mopidy 3.4.1-2-ge245adbc documentation
OK, as noted above I tried this and the metadata looks as it should to
me, so why doesn’t Mopidy-File do anything with it?
A Mopidy album is a more generic concept, available to all backends and
treated appropriately by each.
Thanks for your help so far. Treat me gently, I find the audio/video
world very confusing.
Could you explain what happens and why that doesn’t meet expectations with a concrete example so we can understand where you’re coming from? And I would still recommend Mopidy-Local.
What happens is nothing! It is thus rather difficult to provide a
‘concrete example’.
Slightly more seriously what I mean is that nothing about ‘Albums’
appears anywhere in any of the Mopidy clients I have tried.
I’m not sure quite what I’m expecting to see so it’s difficult to say
exactly what’s wrong. However it does seem that something isn’t quite
right.
As I have noted above my track files do seem to have fairly sensible
metadata, including album names, so the information is there to be
displayed. Is it simply that clients are not using what’s available,
or would I see something more if I used Mopidy-Local instead of
Mopidy-File? I’m probably as much confused by my lack of knowledge of
what to expect as by anything actually not working as it should.
So, if I install Mopidy-Local do I need to disable Mopidy-File or will
they play nicely together? … or do I need (as I saw elsewhere here)
to point Mopidy-File and Mopidy-Local at different directories?
It is thus rather difficult to provide a