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General => MusicBee Wishlist => Topic started by: Paranoidandroid on February 18, 2022, 02:10:59 AM

Title: Column for "on device"
Post by: Paranoidandroid on February 18, 2022, 02:10:59 AM
Just started using MusicBee and I think it's great, but one thing that I would love to see is an "on device" column that shows... Well... Whether or not something is on your device.

Calibre handles this well with e-books - the column only pops up when you plug in a device, as seen here. (https://www.xitimonitor.com/news/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/Calibre.png)

I greatly prefer manually sending music to my device rather than syncing playlists or the full library, but it's frustrating without a good way of seeing what's on there without jumping around to different windows.

I haven't seen a program that handles this well for Android but I really like this one - this addition would make this player pretty well perfect for me.
Title: Re: Column for "on device"
Post by: phred on February 18, 2022, 02:25:35 AM
Reading your request very quickly I don't see how this would work if you're manually putting tracks on your device. In order for MB to show you what tracks are on the device it would need to either scan the entire device to find the files, or you would have to tell it where to look.

If you were to create a playlist of tracks to sync to the device all you'd have to do is look at the playlist to see what's be synced over. You could even set up a highlight rule so that when browsing through your collection the tracks that have been synced would have a highlight.

Granted that I haven't spent a lot of time thinking about your wish but I think that since there are other ways to do this, it's not really necessary.
Title: Re: Column for "on device"
Post by: Paranoidandroid on February 18, 2022, 02:57:09 AM
Reading your request very quickly I don't see how this would work if you're manually putting tracks on your device. In order for MB to show you what tracks are on the device it would need to either scan the entire device to find the files, or you would have to tell it where to look.

If you were to create a playlist of tracks to sync to the device all you'd have to do is look at the playlist to see what's be synced over. You could even set up a highlight rule so that when browsing through your collection the tracks that have been synced would have a highlight.

Granted that I haven't spent a lot of time thinking about your wish but I think that since there are other ways to do this, it's not really necessary.

Sorry, when I said "manually send" I didn't mean by doing it in explorer, I meant by selecting them in MusicBee > right click > send to device. So it would just need to be scanning the folder structure that MusicBee uses

You're right that there are other ways of doing it, but they aren't nearly as fast. Lets say I'm heading out and I want to have all my Bob Dylan on my phone, but I've added a couple albums and haven't listened to him recently. With a column that shows if something is on your device, all you have to do is go to Bob Dylan and sort by "on device" to very quickly see whats there and whats not.

You are able to display a "Playlist" column, so you can see that way if stuff is supposed to be there, but theres no verification of what actually *is*. In my very limited use of the program so far, it seems stable but sync problems do happen in all programs at some point. It seems like a silly minor thing, but when dealing with large libraries a little bit of an extra thing like this can make a huge difference in user experience.
Title: Re: Column for "on device"
Post by: frankz on February 18, 2022, 04:18:41 AM
Are you aware how long it takes to scan a full device with a sizable library over MTP?  You'd want MB to do this every time you connected your device?

I agree with phred, by slightly adjusting your own process - rather than sending things the way you are, adding things you want on your phone to a dedicated playlist and removing things you no longer want from that playlist, keeping that playlist synched to your device, and displaying the playlist column in your Musicbee layout - this can be achieved with much less overhead and no work by the sole developer of Musicbee.  It is, maybe, one tick less convenient, and in return you get what you want.
Title: Re: Column for "on device"
Post by: Paranoidandroid on February 18, 2022, 01:22:40 PM
Are you aware how long it takes to scan a full device with a sizable library over MTP?
I can say honestly that no, I don't. My assumption would be "not very long" but I'm guessing by your response that I'm wrong.
Title: Re: Column for "on device"
Post by: ma_t14 on February 20, 2022, 05:51:06 PM
Theoretically it should be possible to achieve this by keeping track of files that were synced or sent manually to a device through MB. That way you avoid the need to scan the device. Storing that info in MB's own db would mean instant access.

A native implementation of "exists on device x" sounds like a useful idea and something I would use.

+1
Title: Re: Column for "on device"
Post by: Paranoidandroid on February 20, 2022, 06:42:13 PM
That's more or less what I think too.

I haven't done any programming since highschool about fifteen years ago so I know next to nothing on the topic, but when you sync your playlist it doesn't take forever to do, and you can do that on device connect, do I'm not really sure why this would be any different. The ability to check if something is ok the device is already there in some way, otherwise doing a playlist sync would send the same files every time.