[music app] Folder browsing view

[Ashtorak]

Would be great to have support for a 'folders' view that would let the user browse a tree and add a whole folder to the playing queue. This feature would be great for users with folder-organized music collections. (as asked by João Pinheiro on 2015-06-19)

[Victor Thompson (vthompson)]

Hi Ashtorak! Thanks for pushing that question forward as a feature request! If we were to design and implement some form of folder navigation, I could see 3 different places it could go:

1. I could see it being implemented as an additional tab
2. Potentially the Songs tab could be "morphed" into a folder driven layout given a settings toggle or a "sections toggle" [1] or maybe a header action.
3. A setting could toggle the whole app to be folder/file driven and display cover art as applicable. This would get rid of the Album/Artist/Songs views. IMO, this would be the least favorable solution.

1 - http://i.imgur.com/uRFJEuG.png

[Ashtorak (n-mail-8)]

I would prefer 1. option. I don't see why there shouldn't be space for another point in the menu. So 2. is not necessary. 3. I don't know what is the idea, is it easier to implement? Else I don't see any benefit from the user point of view.

[Jouni Helminen (jounihelminen)]

I think that's a nice idea. I think having it as a separate view is probably preferrable. Maybe call it Files?

Are we OK to reuse the playlists UI for this? Ie. level 1 shows folders, level 2 shows contents of each folder. Or do we want something more file manager like?

[Vincas Dargis (talkless)]

This would be great, as currently there is not even playlist import [1], so using Music app is rather incontinent in my use case...

Jouni: My suggestion would be separate view (maybe called "Files", why not), where user would see filesystem treeview, with checkbox for each item.. One could check wanted files or whole folders. Top right corner could have "check" ✓ button to apply selection and open queue view with all these files added.

[1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/music-app/+bug/1513222

[Max Waffel (maxwaffel)]

Sony MP3 players have such a great folder browsing view. It's a list view which shows all audio files and subdirectories of the current folder.
1. When you click a audio file: The queue view is opened with all files from this directory.
2. When you click on a folder: you enter the folder (parent folder is accessable via key on the device.)
It's perfect to browse my well organised (but badly tagged) library.

[_Sven_ (sw-8)]

Any news about this nice feature? It would be great to have it soon. At the moment i improvise by changing id3 tags of every single file´. Filename is "Artist - Title.mp3". I change Title tag from filename and Genre tag from folderpath. Sort by Genre now show me something similar to the folder structure with a Title list sorted like the files in my mp3 folder.

This is a bad solution. I have to edit all new files by hand and i need 2 copies of each file because all other devices im using supporting folder/file view (NAS, Car, TV).