Disable Media Library

[Simples]

I've searched these forums but can't find any mention of a solution.

 

I do however see others having the same problem...

 

Is there no way to turn off the accursed "media library" function?

 

I've just downloaded the trial version, hoping to find a media player without this atrocious "media library" that every player on the Android platform seems to have copied from the appalling Google Play Now.

 

Instead, Poweramp's media library function is the most egregious i've yet seen.

 

It's an absolute deal breaker, renders the software virtually unusable and i'd pay good money for a simple media player that does only what it's told to do, and nothing else.

 

A decent player should have, as an absolute minimum, Play/Pause, Stop, FWD/RWD and Prev/Next controls, plus a volume slider (not a "knob"!), all together on their own screen, uncluttered by any lists, album art or other junk.

 

These are the basic play controls that any player GUI should have, before anything else.

 

Secondly, there should be a simple file requester for adding files and folders to a playlist, and a simple playlist editor for editing those playlists.  However these should be on separate screens to the main player controls, to avoid clutter and bloat (ie. having a tiny, incomplete set of controls underneath a giant blob of "album art" is terrible design, and simply copying Google's poor lead).

 

All other options and settings should be, almost quite literally, optional settings, accessed by separate screens or menus.

 

A good example would be MPC on Windows.  Or VLC on Windows (the 'droid version is just yet another Google Play Now reskin).  Rockbox is another fair example, however i suspect if we ever get an Android version it'll just join the back of the Google Play Now Conga line like Poweramp and all the other players...

 

Play controls, file requester, and a playlist editor.  That's all i want.  Cash waiting.

 

 

Why do i hate media libraries so much?  Because while they may work fine for a limited set of circumstances (a small number of commercial album downloads, say), for an extensive collection of underground dance music tracks the library function is worse than useless - it just shuffles everything into inane, senseless lists, some thousands of entries long, jumbled, confused and completely DISORGANISED.  The exact opposite of what the original file structure already perfectly accomplished, and what a library function is ostensibly supposed to be for.

 

Examples:

 

  - listed neatly in alphabetical order (but no useful order) i have umpteen "CD1" folders, and "CD2" folders, "CD3" and "CD4" etc., all disembodied from their parent folders and no way of unscrambing this mess.

 

 - the library function does not, and cannot work as intended.  It cannot differentiate between artist and track names, or labels.  It cannot differentiate between the many various styles of Hardcore, Drum & Bass, Oldschool, Two-Step, originals, remixes, etc. etc.  that comprise my collection.  Moreover, dance music is made to be mixed - you don't just pop an album on and listen to the whole thing like it's a pop music LP, so album lists are entirely redundant, even if they worked.  What's wrong with my original folder structure, and why don't i have access to it?

 

 - I've got over 40 Gb (and growing) of tunes in the collection (tunes, not "songs").  Listing them all as an entire collection is incredibly dumb and tedious - what am i supposed to do, scroll through that lot looking for a track?

 

To be able to use a music player i need to be able to make playlists from orignal file path structures.  Conglomorating and amalgamating and shuffling everything into a sprawling disorganised database is the antithesis of useability.  It's just one ginormous garbled gamut, a gargantuan gormless glut of a goulash, ungovernable, impenetrable, unnavigable, unsortable.  I don't want it, don't need it, can't use it, it doesn't work anyway and worst of all it's depriving me of the very functionality it's supposed to facilitate.

 

A player, with full play controls (including a volume slider!), on their own screen, with a file requester and playlist editor on separate screens.  Can Poweramp offer this most rudimentary level of functionality, and if not, can anyone point me to a player that does?

 

Thanks for reading!

[Simples]

Found a soution...  Rocket Player.  It doesn't let you turn off the media library, and there's no way to stop it scanning.  But it does let you hide all the tabs for the library. 

 

It's still annoying just knowing that it's there, lurking under the surface, that it takes 20 mins to complete a scan and that allowing all its tabs to be hidden (hooray!) actually just makes it even more pointless and redundant than it was anyway...  but at least it's out of your face and not cluttering the GUI.

 

Furthermore it allows browsing folders in their original path structure (huzzah!) and also recursively adds media in subfolders to parent folder playlists, just like any normal, sane media player on the PC or a personal media player (Walkman et al).

 

It even has volume sliders (incl. pre-amp & replay gain (with a nice limiter - effectively normalisation)), instead of awkward knobs, although not on the main player control screen...  so it still makes really terrible use of screen real estate like every other player, but maybe this can be addressed in future updates, and at least it's something i can work with in the meantime.

 

Sooo... Rocketplayer gets my mullah, and a nice review.  I'll keep an eye on Poweramp to see if it improves in these areas (in a nutshell, ergonomics) - i do like the tone controls and it does sound nice, but would take many hours to make a simple playlist that RP lets me accomplish in seconds.

 

 

Laters peeps...

[flyingdutchman]

Simples I have some comments on

"Why do i hate media libraries so much? Because while they may work fine for a limited set of circumstances (a small number of commercial album downloads, say), for an extensive collection of underground dance music tracks the library function is worse than useless - it just shuffles everything into inane, senseless lists, some thousands of entries long, jumbled, confused and completely DISORGANISED. The exact opposite of what the original file structure already perfectly accomplished, and what a library function is ostensibly supposed to be for"

From this I suspect that your music is either not tagged or poorly tagged. The whole point of the ability to apply mp3 tags is to present the music in a multitude of organised ways, independent from the way it is organised on your device. I take the point that you are not able to select folders when creating playlists. Help is at hand though by using an advanced Playlist Manager such as

http://www.playlistmanager.webspace.virginmedia.com/npm/

which integrates with Poweramp. Not only does it allow you to create (android) playlists from folder structures, it also offers creation of (smb) playlists located on other devices such as attached drives. It has lots of other functionality too and development is ongoing.

I am sure that when the new release of Poweramp finally arrives, it will be able to play such smb playlists too as currently is does not.

Update: the aforementioned Rocket Player does play smb playlists hooray!!!

[Simples]

Thanks for yor thoughts, and i did consider using a playlist manager as a solution but it just seemed an extra hassle for what should be a rudimentary level of functionality for any dedicated media player.  I would've resorted to it had i not found that RP just about meets my requirements.

 

And yes, i totally get that professionally-made media files, such as album downloads, will be properly meta-tagged and even supplied with playlists.  But if you've spent years acruing a media collection compiled from wax, mixtapes and so on, for your own use only, then tagging is an extra hassle - i've always got by fine using just filenames.  I've never before encountered a situation where a media player needs to know what it's playing - typically i'll just drag'n'drop a few folders onto a playlist, remove the clangers and re-order the remaining sequence.   All my folders, subfolders and files are labelled properly and organised logically, so it was a shock to discover that the Android platform was so bereft of media players that worked with basic path structures.

 

Every media player i've ever used before worked this way - MPC and VLC on Windows, Sony Walkmans and Sony Ericsson phones, Samsung YP-R0 with or without Rockbox, even cheap personal media players from X-Micro etc. etc.   None of these ever insisted on scanning the entire device and dissecting everything into jumbled lists, attempting to catalogue everything by type.

 

In a nutshell, this whole "media library" concept is far too presumptive, and contingent upon those assumptions, none of which in my case apply.  I have thousands of tracks, few of which are "songs" or "albums", let alone by the same "artist".  I've been building my collection since the earliest days of MP3 - back on the Amiga in the mid-nineties, so i'm no Luddite, and it's frankly an affront to find that almost all of Android's media players, many of which boast of enabling the user to listen to their music THEIR way, actually do the exact polar opposite..

 

So while i wouldn't want to deny others this media library functionality, the ability to just disable it and simply drag'n'drop files and folders, remove clangers and re-order the sequence, is all i need.  So long as it preserves path structure and recursively adds sub-folders, that's all i want.

 

 

 

ETA: ...and if anyone's wondering why i keep "clangers" that i don't (or rarely) listen to, instead of just deleting them permanently.... it's because this is a collection of underground dance tracks, 90% of which are rare and can't simply be downloaded from regular databases such as iTunes etc.  So there's a commitmant to preserve them for posterity.

[flyingdutchman]

You may be interested in

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=at.schima.apps.mpm2&hl=en

This playlist maker builds playlists using folder structures only.

[andrewilley]

I rarely use the Library modes either, much preferring Folders view (within which I have a lot more manual control). If you don't want them cluttering up your screen you can disable them all from Library View > Menu-button > List Options. However the tab itself will still be visible, albeit empty, but at least you can't select one by accident.

Andre