Indexing Music help on SMB Shares

[Bob Manekshaw]

Is there any particular reason why Bubble player doesn't index music held on SMB shares? 

I use the Bubble server to give me access to my Gerbera Media server but as Java is a security risk on my platform I currently have an android phone acting as the bubble server.  I also leave BubbleUPNP running so I can access a;ll my media files directly using the SMB connection however I would like t have my media indexed.  I have a couple of problems with my gerbera version and due to hardware limitations of the gerbera server, I am unable to compile later versions at present and I thought, why am I doing this anyway when I have a far more powerful android phone (all be it with a broken screen) which could easily do the job.

It would be great if there could be an option to enable indexing for a particular shares mapping if it doesn't already have it squirrelled away somewhere that I haven't spotted yet.

Thanks - Bob

[Bubblesoft]

Hi,

BubbleUPnP does not index SMB shares because SMB is a recent addition and BubbleUPnP traditionally deals with UPnP/DLNA media servers

which does not need indexing, since it is their job to do indexing.

Although I understand your request, there is no plan to add advanced indexing of media for SMB, WebDAV and cloud storage services to offer more

elaborate browsing hierarchies (by albums, etc). Thus they remain limited to filesystem browsing, with more limited metadata in the case of SMB shares.

Depending on the content of a SMB folder (if inferred to contain a music album for example), BubbleUPnP may extract some metadata, but this is slow and not cached currently.

I may improve this and cache that data in a future version.

SMB is less efficient that UPnP/DLNA media server as for playback it requires the app do http proxying of the media stored on the SMB share:

whenever you play a SMB media, it goes renderer -> BubbleUPnP -> SMB server, instead of renderer -> UPnP/DLNA media server. 

Avoid SMB if you can and use a more competent UPnP/DLNA media server (MinimServer recommended for music).