"Virtual Folders"

[freemansteve 8]

Hi - after a pause, I thought I'd try Emby again on my NAS, to see what's changed....
Specifically, the beta - emby-server-synology72_4.9.0.31_x86_64.spk

I'm running DLNA, and just testing it on my very large music collection. N.B. All files in very structured folders and perfectly done tags and cover art.

I have looked quite hard, but I still don't understand how to change virtual folders or database views that appear in the control app for my playback device.....

The first pic shows what I want to see (Synology Media Server "view"), but the second pics shows masses of clutter that I'd like to suppress (Emby).... How do I configure to simplify the views?

 

[user24 312]

Hi, Have you tried looking at DLNA Custom Profiles and the Plain Storage Folders option?

I don't know anything about setting it up myself, so not sure if it will help? Others may know more.

However, if this is feasible, you could end up with the Emby view being the exact same info as your current Synology view???

[freemansteve 8]

I just found the page you mention, but ticking the box "Display all folders etc....." doesn't seem to work on my version.

I "save" the settings but they are lost when I go back to check, and the virtual folders I see on my controller are unchanged. It really should not be that obfuscated for simple and obvious settings!

My other problem is the same as I found with the previous few betas - Emby is horrendously slow when I'm trying to view playlists - I mean like a blank screen for 15 seconds, which makes it kind of unusable for me. I did try an earlier full release version which was OK, response-wise.  I reported all this before, but nothing has improved AFAICT - I think the whole structure of Emby may need a rethink - it's currently not really suitable for large audio collections, even when I run it on a fast PC (my NAS is pretty nippy in all other respects). UMS on the same PC is massively faster and much easier, but I just can't get it to work using Docker on my NAS!

Edited November 9, 2024 by freemansteve

[user24 312]

Oh well, perhaps someone else will know...! (It could be much more involved than just ticking the box.)

Anyway, I don't have any problems with Emby DLNA and Playlists with a music library with 100k+ tracks. (I know there are some ongoing problems, reported by many, related to Genres playback that are being looked at though.)

I possibly have a comparable setup (Naim though, not Cambridge Audio). I keep the audio library currently on a Synology DS218+ BUT have the Emby Server on a laptop PC.

The Naim app gives the exact same folder views as you are seeing on the Evo app, so its likely derived from Emby?

I don't like the Naim app at all, so just use the Emby web app and DLNA cast direct to my Naim devices. (The various music views/browsing is far superior to Naim.)

It seems like you may have already tried doing something similar? Maybe it's just the Synology version of Emby that is slow???

[freemansteve 8]

I appreciate your interest and replies!

Note that I have been using beta versions - I forget why, but there was a fix that caught my eye a while back! - Are you using the "full release" version? This also worked reasonably well for me, but something is wrong in the betas, IMHO. I have a large collection too, and navigating through my folder to reach albums and track is fine*,  but I have about 250 playlists, some being mixes with up to 100 tracks listed - it's the playlists that have become painfully slow in the beta code.

For me, I wanted to be able to access all my music either via PC or NAS, or both. The music data on the NAS is identical to what I have on a 2TB SSD on PC. The idea was really to save electricity by being able turn one off but still being able to stream, also so that I could run extreme tasks (100% CPU) on the PC when necessary, but still listen to music or play videos on my stereo or TV, with the data coming off the NAS (and the NAS is a reasonably fast X64 unit that has more bandwidth on read/write than my LAN, i.e. it can do over 100MB/s)

*With Emby betas I have tried, the playlists are still slow to load into my phone app (it's the graphics, IMHO), even when running on a PC (i.e. the NAS not being at all involved, as the music is on a 2TB SSD locally on the PC), but when running Universal Media Server on the same PC (separately, not concurrently), the same playlists load to the phone app almost instantly. The main difference is that with UMS the named playlist files that show on my app (e.g. "Mix.m3u") don't have the "composite graphic" that you see (after 15secs!!) on Emby.  Frankly, I don't need a graphic for each playlist - it's a mess - and I wonder if Emby had a means of turning this composite off, it may perform better - I suspect that it's somehow not pre-processing and caching the composite images for playlists, but creating them on the fly. If so, surely this could be improved, but I'd be happy with a tick-box that just turned off graphics for playlists!,

As an aside:
The NAIM and Cambridge units are pretty similar, both state of the art for all-in-one streamers, and the control apps are similar, but they'd have to be really! ("StreamMagic" in my case).  CA are continually improving the UI on the app (on the front panel display on the Evo too) and I find the latest app version (3.0.0 for Android) to be pretty good.

CA have implemented some improvements that I sent to them, as I'm one of a few official beta testers for CA - they really do listen! In fact, they also fixed a bug with blurred album cover art when using Emby (only), earlier this year, after I gave them precise details of how to reproduce it... CA are pretty good to deal with...

Edited November 10, 2024 by freemansteve
spelling, grammar!

[user24 312]

9 hours ago, freemansteve said:

Are you using the "full release" version?

Yes, standard Windows current full release version. I did set up a Synology beta version as well, but haven't really used it greatly, as yet. Accessing via either NAS or PC is ideal, I hope to fully set this up one day! I think you are currently much further advanced with this than me...

Only a dozen main playlists set up so far, as I mostly select/listen via other groupings. If you're just recently coming back to Emby, are you aware that "smart" playlists and potentially other "smart" functions are apparently planned for the next major release? This will be interesting to see, but of course may not make your setup any faster.

If I'm following correctly what you are explaining, I don't use the Emby-generated 'composite graphic' images for anything. I replace all of these with my own custom images. Maybe this could speed up things for you??? But a lot of work to create 250 different ones for all of your playlists! Perhaps you could test with one custom image across all??? Thus bypassing the composite generation?

I did have one of the first DacMagic units that CA put out many years ago, so am aware of the brand and the product range. When I was looking for some new equipment about 5 years ago, Naim had the Uniti streamers and the Muso smart speakers that provided the combination that I needed. Now, there are many more options available and CA Evo would definitely be on my 'short-list' if I was buying now.

You've got me interested in doing a UMS comparison now! I did use Asset UPnP for several years before deciding to try Emby for music. I expect you may be familiar with it? Have you tried Roon? I don't need Tidal/Qobuz integration or ARC. Their advanced metadata would be nice though...

Thanks for sharing the extra info. I'm always interested in how others have Emby music set up (software and hardware) and usually learn a little bit from everyone!

Edited November 10, 2024 by user24
added "Thus bypassing..."

[freemansteve 8]

I have only been testing the beta versions of Emby on my NAS and on my PC to be fair, so I may try the main release versions again.

I now recall that the reason I switched to one of the previous betas was to do with text file (i.e. including .m3u files) encoding, and Emby was not handling accents, umlauts etc correctly in my playlist files (generated in windows using PlaylistCreator), but all that may be ancient history now. In any case, I now have tools to sort out all the oddities of encoding (CRLF, UTF-8 vs ANSI and all the rest).

I'm not to happy with Emby writing to all my playlists though - whether it changes the file content or not, all playlists get changed "modified" dates, which plays havoc with all my file syncing of playlist across my various systems and backup storage. It's madness!

I don't understand when you say "I don't use the Emby-generated 'composite graphic' images for anything". To be clear, I'm referring to the pictures that appear against playlists (see pic below from the StreamMagic app) that are made of 4 separate images from various album art, but if you know of a way to turn these off, that would be excellent! I'm happy with just text names for playlists, but I did read that you can include a reference in the playlist files to a specific image file. I did play with this a while back, but if I recall, it was non-standard (although .m3u files are non-standardized) and caused issues on other players - as I said, I like to have one set of playlists that are portable for all players and all systems. It would not be too hard for me to process 250 *.m3u's using a batch file, but even easier if Emby themselves made some sensible changes!

As for media players, they are all leapfrogging each other - no doubt a new Evo version an Naim version is about to hit the shops (and NAD,  Rose, Eversolo etc)! On paper, the Evo has a tiny numerical edge over NAIM with better DAC, terrific Hypex power amps,  but I'm pretty sure it's all now beyond worthwhile human hearing.  Check Hypex amps on Audio Science Review - they test using numbers, not just being a corrupt and cynical review site that just chucks in random and meaningless adjectives to get advertising revenue!  The problem is that audio lovers are a tiny minority interest compared with video fans for Emby - the focus is far too much on pulling info from the internet about what colour toilet roll the various actors are using this month, and integrating 10 subscriptions, rather than just the necessary basics. Stored videos on my NAS are navigated perfectly well by folder name and filename by all three TVs and various phones and tablets in our house - is some want to know who the director was married to in 1996, there's a thing called Wikipedia! I hate clutter....

Do try UMS on your PC - for windows, it's my first choice currently - when I figure out how to use Docker properly, Emby will no longer interest me - I only ever wanted to see pretty graphics at folder level (album, disk, band), which the Synology Media Server doesn't do....  I did try Roon a while back, but again, way too much clutter and a nut-job subscription cost, plus it is very proprietary. I buy my own CDs or FLACs, and had tons already before streaming was possible, so pretty much since the first media player could play my ripped CDs I learned to ensure I had a very structured set of folders, and then to have a standard way of doing file naming, tags and cover art (and now have a load of scripts and configs for the very tools I use - so a new CD is sorted in a few clicks, hence no need for a server to do internet lookups for these). There are no end of issues reported for Tidal et al., reported on the Evo user's site, and for other brands, usually app issues or source servers not working well, or normalization issues, or up-scaling etc., so I'm glad I didn't need get into streaming. I'm just wary of any server or streaming service that "processes" the music data - for my collection on NAS,  I don't need any audio transcoding (it's 2024!), I can play 24/192 FLACs on every device in the house, untouched, over WiFi, with zero issues.

Thanks for indulging me!





 

Edited November 11, 2024 by freemansteve

[user24 312]

1 hour ago, freemansteve said:

I don't understand when you say "I don't use the Emby-generated 'composite graphic' images for anything". To be clear, I'm referring to the pictures that appear against playlists (see pic below from the StreamMagic app) that are made of 4 separate images from various album art, but if you know of a way to turn these off, that would be excellent! I'm happy with just text names for playlists, but I did read that you can include a reference in the playlist files to a specific image file. I did play with this a while back, but if I recall, it was non-standard (although .m3u files are non-standardized) and caused issues on other players - as I said, I like to have one set of playlists that are portable for all players and all systems. It would not be too hard for me to process 250 *.m3u's using a batch file, but even easier if Emby themselves made some sensible changes!

I don't think you can "turn these off" directly (I could be wrong though?), but you can add your own custom images. Something like this then... 

• David Bowie Playlist is standard auto-generated composite image
• Icon Test Playlist is non-standard custom-created icon image 

You can add the custom images as follows:

three dot menu bottom RHS of playlist image > Edit Images > Primary > three dot menu > Select Image File > Browse

I guess you will be able to easily find it and there may likely also be other paths to get to it.

If you look here:

https://fonts.google.com/icons

there are plenty of icons (e.g. search for "playlist") to find one you like that will match Emby/CA style, and any other apps that get their icons from here.

You could set all of your 250 playlists exactly the same if you wanted to?

You can apply the same customisation idea anywhere the composite images appear.

Here's a non-playlist example from my current Emby UI:

Getting back to the playlists... the custom images are stored in the Emby Server database (for my setup) here:

C:\Users\user24\AppData\Roaming\Emby-Server\programdata\data\userplaylists\Icon Test [playlist]

That might be enough to get you started??? I'll try to reply to some of your other comments a bit later when I have more time... Cheers!

Edited November 11, 2024 by user24
added playlist icons image

[freemansteve 8]

Thanks - I'll look into it. They make what should be easy stuff seem hard though - very little seems explained or documented!
At the moment I'm distracted again with the whole *.m3u file encoding thing of "ANSI" versus UTF-8 etc and "non-english characters" for for want of a better expression. I just saw a playlist being played that was short of a couple of legit files - I'm trying to come up with a scheme that works universally between Emby, UMS, other servers, Foobar2000, VLC and StreamMagic, and have been reading up on it all...

[freemansteve 8]

Hmm, I'm at a point again where I think I'll pause using Emby, or at least the betas...

I already knew Emby parsed playlist files (which it has to), but it caused a change to the "modified" dates which then caused issues with file syncing. Now I have found that it also can modify playlists without informing you, such as adding fields like #EXTART and more, and can actually remove the entire contents of a playlist! This does not necessarily work when the playlists are used by other programs - it's just too weird...

I noticed that if you add a comment line (those starting with "#",  e.g. "# €" as the last line in a file) Emby does not respect this, and rejects all the files in the list, while every other server I am using has no problem with it.

I realize there is no standard (other than de facto) for m3u's, but Emby's treatment of them is strange and out of step with other programs. It should treat user playlists simply as read-only hints, and make its own internal playlist database, which the user could possibly configure....
 

Edited November 12, 2024 by freemansteve

[user24 312]

13 hours ago, freemansteve said:

Thanks - I'll look into it.

You’re most welcome! Sorry to hear that your .m3u’s still aren’t working as expected. Unfortunately, I can’t help you out with this, but maybe someone else can? Before you disappear though, here’s some more thoughts prompted by some other comments that you shared...

I installed UMS but haven’t had time to give it a reasonable go, just yet. It seems familiar, so I may have tried it out some time ago or may just be mistaking it with LMS or something else??? At the moment, Emby is mostly meeting my needs and I’m anticipating I’ll use playlists more once they have smart playlists as a core function in the next major release. (I did start using the Smart Playlists 2.0 plugin, which was useful for Song playlists, but not for Album collections, so it will be interesting to see what Emby comes up with.)

One person’s clutter can be another person’s critical information, and vice versa. So flexible customisation can be very useful to set up the various views/pages to suit. Because I’m not a big fan of the Emby composite images, as mentioned already, I have created most of my own. There’s a good forum section https://emby.media/community/index.php?/forum/70-fan-art-videos/ where you may find some nice images created by others. Based on your comments though, I thought you would likely prefer basic icons rather than more detailed graphics...

Another way to reduce “clutter” (at least with the web app) is to hide and rearrange info with custom CSS. With a little bit of help, I’ve worked out how to reconfigure menu tabs and vertical sections on various pages. Here’s the relevant forum section: https://emby.media/community/index.php?/forum/144-web-app-css/. This won't help though with any client apps - Emby, CA, Naim, other...

I would agree with you that Emby is much more Movies/TV focussed and that Music comes a distant second. (It is what it is though, and I've put forward my constructive suggestions!) A good example of this is that Emby combines Album Artists, Artists and Composers in different configurations, depending upon the page view and vertical section being used. It’s been mentioned elsewhere by myself and others, so if you’re interested, I expect you can search out the relevant posts. I imagine if Emby decided to combine Movie Directors and Actors into one homogenous grouping there would be a major revolt!!!

I’ve also found that with careful and creative use of embedded metadata (using Mp3tag) and Emby “Collections”, “Playlists”, “Genres” and “Tags” it’s possible to come up with workarounds to solve many issues. It’s great that Emby can import ROOTRACKTAG into Tags for individual Songs, but ROONALBUMTAG for Albums isn’t supported yet.

I’d love a user-defined “Related Artists” section in place of (or in addition to) the auto-generated “More Like This” section. As the Emby algorithm uses some type of combination weighting of “Genres” and “Tags” and other info, the results returned are sometimes completely irrelevant, therefore I hide this section with CSS. I also prefer to browse by Album Artist and then Albums, so also hide the "Songs" vertical section on the Album Artist pages with CSS.

A Genes/Styles parent-child many-to-many relationship would be another nice music addition. The recent changes to the Genre pages are a good start, but more could be done...

A “Release Type” category (e.g. Studio Albums, Live Albums, EPs, Singles, Compilations, Soundtracks) is also important for many music fans. I think the recent “Group By” function for Collections has great potential for implementing “Release Type” as a viewable option...

I’ve posted several other music suggestions previously, so that’s enough for here!!!

From reading many different media/music forums on a regular basis, both brand specific and independent, I think Emby for music is very undervalued by the wider market, in comparison to competitors. Overall I think the Emby team do a great job with likely very limited resources. A few more music improvements with browsing/playback and Emby has the potential to be better than Plex/Plexamp.

Anyway, have fun on your music journey and with getting your playlists sorted...

[freemansteve 8]

Thanks for all the additional tips and knowledge.

I will come back & try Emby again at some point, and hope it survives and succeeds.

FWIW, I don't need any server to look up anything (by default) on the internet, let alone change anything at all in my music files (tags/artwork) or touch my playlists - these are all perfect for me as they are and work on every playback system I have - besides there is nothing that I can't do with a few clicks with the tools I use (fre:ac, AdvancedRemaner, MP3Tag with integrated AlbumArtDownloader, PlaylistCreator, Notepad++, and for video, Handbrake, MKVToolNix, plus batch scripts, etc) to get the OCD-level of consistency and functionally I like   Call me a control freak!

When I'm next in the mood, I'll try a released version of Emby see what is different to the beta, but in the meantime, I'll try to unravel Docker (it must be something simple I'm not setting right, but then then the Docker stuff is largely a config mess from one system to another!)

UMS is OK - it does need going the through the advanced config to turn off nonsense that you don't need,  but it's usually just a few tick-boxes. It is very basic, so it will either just work fine or seem unacceptably primitive to you.   I tried Asset, but found it was like like living in 1998, and was a bit weird. I think I tried LMS at some point too, and Serviio (but not yet on my Synology box).... Fun experiments aside, I'm finding Synology's Media Server just does the basics very well - it's just not pretty with graphics at folder/band level....
 

[Luke 42077]

@freemanstevecan you give Emby another try? Thanks !