This plugin is in very early development stage. There may be dragons inside. Please check Current stage
Media library is currently missing in Deadbeef, so people wanting to use Deadbeef were left with two options:
- Use abandoned and outdated file browser plugin, that was very unstable
- Tediously create playlists for your musical needs
First option was fixed by creating Filebrowser Reborn which aims at being similar to original, while also fixing everything that was wrong with it. Second option might work for some, but is really not an option at all for others, because of the tedious process.
This plugin is based on the Filebrowser Reborn plugin, which has sparked the idea of creating this. Both plugins are currently in development and are developed together with some shared code-base. Media library exists because sometimes you want to browse your albums, group by artists and so on. I personally use both plugins side by side. There also might be a situation where your songs are not divided into sane folder structure, making the Filebrowser less user-friendly to use.
This plugin won't miraculously save you if your library is lacking both filesystem (folder) and metadata structure, but it is important to note, that the plugin will try to be smart with what it has. If you lack metadata for some albums, it will try to guess correct structure from folders, or if you lack Album artist metadata in mix albums or compilations, it will try to organize songs by their cover and album name being same (unlike other players where Album artist entry is absolutely necessary for correct organization of files into albums). It is still recommended that you keep your metadata in good state since it's a primary source of information for plugin. Having hundreds of files in the same folder with great metadata won't hurt usability of this plugin, while not having some metadata with perfect folder structure can still hurt your experience.
Currently works:
- Fetch all media files in a folder
- Load metadata from each file
- Show icon view containing all the albums with cover art
- Double click the album to load the album tracks into currently selected playlist
- Saves the loaded metadata, files and cover arts into cache for quicker startup next time
- Custom config dialog that would be more versatile for showing loaded files and doing imports
- Automatically detect changes in media library paths and automatically import or remove files
- Plugin currently only supports Linux. This is mainly due to using inotify for automatic refresh (and some UNIX only filesystem operations)
Planned features:
- Select metadata for grouping into icon view (show artists instead of albums for example)
- Select which metadata should be shown in icon view together with the picture
- Context menu containing quality of life tools (like showing dialog with songs in album, metadata etc.) (Partially)
- Windows support (ideally and eventually MacOS, but that is not possible in near future for multiple reasons)
- See issues on github for more planned features and discussion
Keep in mind that this plugin is very early in development.
Binaries are located on Releases page. You can put them into~/.local/lib/deadbeef/. This will allow you to create new widget.
On Arch Linux:
pacman -S --needed boost-libs gtkmm3 ninja meson gcc taglib
Compile the project:
meson setup build && cd build && ninja
Compile, install, run deadbeef:
meson setup build && meson configure build --buildtype debug && cd build && ninja && cd .. && cp ./build/src/libddb_misc_media_library.so ~/.local/lib/deadbeef/ddb_misc_media_library.so && deadbeef
Binaries will be located in ./build/src/ folder.
After compilation, you can use quick-install.sh to quickly move the file to correct location.
To uninstall the plugin, you can remove the .so file from ~/.local/lib/deadbeef/ or run quick-remove.sh.
If you prefer Makefile for compilation, it is now possible to use that.
make will build the project into ./buildMake folder.
make install will install the plugin
make buildinstall will build and install the plugin
make buildinstallrun will build, install plugin and run deadbeef in one command. This is ease of life target for debugging and developing.
make uninstall will uninstall the plugin
make clean will delete buildMake folder
Note: This project uses boost modules: serialization, filesystem and system. Default path to this library is set to /usr/lib in Makefile. This is the default on Arch Linux, but this can differ on your environment and since Makefile is dumb and can't find the library itself like meson, neither does boost library support the pkg-config you have to find the boost libraries yourself on your system, if the compilation fails.
Before making contributions, please create issue where the topic can be discussed. This will prevent tedious remakes of code that you would like to merge. This doesn't necessarily apply to small bug fixes or tweaks.