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Library & Selections

The core of Trobar: browse your library, pick what you want, and sync it to any combination of devices.

Browsing

The Library tab lists your music by album artist and album, built from the scan of MUSIC_ROOT. Trobar reads tags first and falls back to the Artist/Album/Track folder convention when tags are missing or malformed; anything that fits neither lands under Unknown Artist/Album. The Library health panel counts those so you can fix the tags and rescan. A compilation is one album under Various Artists (or its albumartist tag), and an artist's page lists the albums by others they play on under Also appears on: selecting one syncs only that artist's tracks on it. Clicking an album, in either view of an artist's page or among the home page's covers, opens it: a larger cover, the year and the track list, by disc when the album has more than one, with a track's own artist shown when it isn't the album's (a guest, a compilation). From there Add to basket sends the album through the device picker, and Add to playlist… and + Playlist add the album or one track. Beside the time of the last scan, it also says how many of the files that scan read were named from their folders, as a hint that their tags are worth fixing.

Album covers come from the art embedded in the audio files; an image file beside them, such as folder.jpg or cover.jpg, isn't read.

After a scan, the Library tab says what changed: tracks added, updated and removed, and, when it happened, files that moved and kept their tracks, files or folders that couldn't be read (their tracks are kept), files that disappeared during the scan, and files named from their folders.

Selections

A selection is your choice of an artist, album, or playlist targeted at one or more devices. The server then works out each device's missing tracks and the clients download the difference.

Sending music to devices

Everything goes through the Sync to… dialog:

  • An artist: Sync entire artist on the artist's page.
  • An album: Sync to… on its row in the Library, or in an artist's Also appears on list.
  • Several albums: tick them in the Library's list view, or tick the checkbox on their covers in the cover view, on the Suggestions tab, or in the home page's Suggestions, Recently added and Recently released widgets; then Select N albums.
  • A playlist: Sync to… on its row in Playlists.

The dialog lists your devices, including any you manage for someone else; an admin's lists every device in the household. Tick the ones the music should go to, then:

  • Add & keep browsing puts it in your Basket for those devices and sends nothing yet;
  • Add & send now adds it and sends, at once, everything in the Basket for the ticked devices. When there is more than what you just picked, the button says how many items will go.

The dialog remembers the devices you last chose, separately for the Library, Playlists, Suggestions, Recently added and Recently released.

The Basket button at the top of the page (shown once something is in it) opens the list of what is waiting, one section per device. Send sends that device's section and leaves the others; × takes an item off that device only; Clear empties the whole Basket. Nothing in the Basket reaches a device until it is sent. The Basket is kept on the server, so it is still there after a reload or in another browser. An item already in the Basket shows In basket where its Sync button was.

Selections are per user: every household member has their own. Artist, album and track selections survive a provider switch, a rescan, and device token regeneration. A selected playlist from the old provider stays selected if the switch carries it over to the new provider, and is removed with it otherwise.

The Selections tab

The Selections tab shows every album, artist and playlist selected for a device you can see, one row each, with a box per device:

  • Tick a box to send it to that device.
  • Untick one of yours and Trobar asks first, saying how many tracks are deleted from the device at its next sync. A track another selection of that device still needs stays.
  • A locked box is kept ticked by someone else's selection (an admin and a delegate see those): hover it to see who. Only they can untick it.
  • A change that fails says so under the row's name, and the boxes show what is true.
  • Forget appears on a row of yours that is ticked on no device: it removes the selection from the list.
  • An artist's part of someone else's album (selected from Also appears on) reads "Artist on Album · 2 of 14 tracks", so it isn't mistaken for the whole album, which reads "Album · whole album, 14 tracks".

Scanning

  • Rescan (on the Library tab) picks up new albums and only re-reads tags for changed files — cheap, run it freely.
  • Full rescan (admins only, beside it) re-reads every file's tags, which is what picks up a changed tag on an unchanged file; over network storage budget minutes per 10k tracks. It only happens when you ask for one.
  • Scans run in the background and the UI polls for progress, so a large scan doesn't block the request.
  • A rescan reaches the devices. A new album under a selected artist goes to every device that selects it, and a file deleted from disk is removed from them, on each device's next sync. A deleted track that a selected playlist still points at stays on the device until the playlist is matched again, and one in an auto-fit set until auto-fit is next refreshed.
  • Moving files doesn't re-download them. A file that moved to another folder with its size and tags unchanged (a renamed folder, a reorganised library) keeps its track, so devices keep their copy. Two identical copies moved at once, or a file changed as it moved, first count as one removed and one added. Once the library's fingerprints are computed, a removed track whose audio matches exactly one new track is merged into it: playlists and selections follow, and a device that would store it under the same name keeps its copy.
  • Nothing rescans the library on its own by default. New files sit unseen — and unfingerprinted, so they can't benefit from recovery-by-fingerprint either — until someone clicks Rescan (or the first-run setup wizard runs it once). If that doesn't fit a set-and-forget deployment, an admin can turn on automatic rescanning in Administration → Configuration → Automatic library rescan: set an interval in hours and Trobar enqueues an incremental (never forced) rescan once that many hours have passed since the previous scan finished. It's off (0) until set.

See also Suggestions for filling devices from listening history, and Devices & Storage for per-device limits and auto-fit.

Supported formats

The scan reads these files into the library; anything else in the music folder is ignored. On a device set to an MP3 format, lossless files are transcoded and the rest are copied as they are.

Extension Format On a device set to MP3
.flac FLAC transcoded
.wav WAV transcoded
.aiff, .aif AIFF transcoded
.m4a ALAC transcoded
.m4a AAC copied as is
.mp3, .aac, .ogg, .opus lossy copied as is

An .m4a file can hold either: the scan reads which, and only ALAC is transcoded. Re-encoding an already-lossy AAC file would only lose quality.