Browse Music by Folders with Music Browser
by Michael Healy @ 9:00 am on June 6th, 2009 in music library, plugins, start menu strips with 24 Comments and Permalink
At one point or another many of us have put a substantial amount of time into organizing our digital music collections. We’re likely to have organized the file structure by genre, artist, album, etc. While the native music library provides a single level of sorting, allowing you to choose to sort by artist or genre, it doesn’t provide a graphical view to do so. Also, once you’ve chosen to sort by a certain type you’ll eventually just end up right back in the album view.
This certainly isn’t desirable if, for instance, you’d like to browse by genre then get a list of artists in that genre. Choosing to sort by a certain genre in the default music library simply gives you a list of all the albums marked with that genre.
Enter Music Browser with the ability to not only browse through your music library by folder but load up artwork for each artist, genre or any other folder method you’ve setup. Adding artwork to your folders is as simple as adding a folder.jpg file to that folder.
To get started with Music Browser download the latest version which supports installation on Windows 7. By default the program will install to the Extra Programs area of Media Center. If you’d like to add an icon to our custom Media Browser strip you can download the reg file to do that right here as well.
It’s not all butter and cream though. Inside the settings panel you’ll notice that you can’t add network shares to the plug-in by default. There’s a way around this though. Open up Windows Explorer and browse to “C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Roaming\MusicBrowser”. Inside you should find a couple of folders and a MusicBrowser.config file. Open it up in Notepad and change the following line to look like so:
<InitialFolder>C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Roaming\MusicBrowser\VirtualFolder.vf</InitialFolder>
Next create a new text file in the same folder called “VirtualFolder.vf” and for each network share add “folder: //SHAREDLOCATION” on it’s own line. For example, “folder: \\MEDIACENTER-PC\Storage\My Music”.
Aside from that small caveat using Music Browser was fairly straightforward. Music Browser also sports three different view-types, list, folder and poster. Each one displaying artwork and folder names differently. All views incorporate the artwork however which is a definite plus over the native music library.
If you don’t already have them adding folder images to each genre and artist can pose quite a time-sink but will surely be rewarding in the end for those who venture onward. For those looking for genre folder icons there is quite a sizable collection at The Genres Pool Flickr group.
Also, though the program doesn’t appear to currently be under development it is open source for anyone willing to pick-up the torch. Perhaps we can get a plug-in as customizable as the widely used Media Browser.
