[FR] Change root folder

[yezhiyi9670]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

I think many people who stick to offline music, including me, organize all their songs well in one particular
"music library" folder.

Instead of having the full SD card scanned and then excluding unwanted folders, I think it's more convenient to include just one folder in the music player.

Describe the solution you'd like

• An option to only include audio files in one or several particular folders.
• An option to "chroot" the filesystem view, i.e. select a folder that the filesystem view treat as the root folder.

Additional context

An example:

• Included folders: ~/_MP3Repo/20220712/Music/ ~/_MP3Repo/20220712/ScoreChecks/
• Filesystem view "chroot": ~/_MP3Repo/20220712/

[daoxi]

I second this, having a whitelist approach (with an option to not ignore folders with .nomedia) makes so much more sense than a blacklist approach, most people don't scatter their music files across the entire file sytem

[nift4]

with an option to not ignore folders with .nomedia

This is out-of-scope and not planned

[yezhiyi9670]

with an option to not ignore folders with .nomedia

Note: .nomedia is an Android media store feature. To include folders with .nomedia, the app have to manually scan the storage, which is both time-consuming and difficult to implement.

[daoxi]

with an option to not ignore folders with .nomedia

Note: .nomedia is an Android media store feature. To include folders with .nomedia, the app have to manually scan the storage, which is both time-consuming and difficult to implement.

No no no... you guys misunderstood what I meant (or maybe I didn't express myself clearly).
I meant when you're already specifying which folder(s) to scan (i.e. whitelist), the app should scan/include everything in those specified folder(s) even if there are .nomedia file(s) there (i.e. just ignore the existence of those .nomedia file(s)).

The reason is that it's a common practice to store album cover art as seperate image files (either as a single cover.jpg file for each album folder, or as multiple same-filename-as-music-file.jpg files for each music file (similar to how .lrc files work)), and usually in these cases, a .nomedia file would be included to prevent those music cover art image files from being scanned by other image viewing/editing apps on your phone, but that same .nomedia file is now also preventing Gramophone from scanning any music files stored in that music folder (which is not ideal, hence my original suggestion)

[nift4]

Unfortunately, we have not misunderstood. Gramophone has no code at all related to .nomedia files because the Android system handles them and their existence automatically by not scanning music, video and image files in folders with .nomedia - and there is no way to force Android to ignore the file for just audio.
(Gramophone does not read all audio files on startup to extract tags, nor does it keep it's own database of tags, we use Android's MediaStore.)
This also implies that the whitelist feature will never will make more music files show up than an empty blacklist.