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Table of Contents

Introduction
Program Start
Albums
Album Pictures
Limitations
Technical
External Licenses

The Classical Music Scanner

What is the program for?

Both Unpopular Music Player and Opus 1 Music Player use Android's media database. Unfortunately it is incomplete, error prone, and the update automatism is hardly to predict and unreliable. Sometimes it fails.

For music management the mentioned programs use their own tagger library to extract the missing and wrong information directly from the music files. This works, but the inconsistency problem remains.

The Classical Music Scanner creates its own database replacing that one of Android for the mentioned programs (if configured accordingly). However, this database only contains information about audio files, neither pictures nor movies. Note that the tagger libraries in the music player applications are no longer used in this case.

Start from Opus 1 Music Player

Via menu entry "Scan Device for Audio Files…" and the context menu.

Start from Unpopular Music Player

Via menu entry "Scan Device for Audio Files…" and the context menu in the Playback view.

Start from Classical Music Tagger

Runs invisibly in background whenever files are changed or deleted.

Start in standalone mode

Just run it and press the green floating button.

The "Auto Scan" looks for changed, added and deleted audio files and updates the database accordingly. In case there many of such changes, the application automatically decides to run a complete scan, this will also happen in case of a failure of whatever reason.

In case of any problems the complete scan can also initiated manally, using the yellow floating button.

Albums, also multi-CD

Contrary to the Android system the scanner detects multi-CD-albums and manages them accordingly. The album folder shall contain some album picture ("folder.jpg") and for each CD its subdirectory named "CD1" etc. or "1" etc..

Otherwise an album is defined by album name and "album artist", and all audio files should be located in the same directory.

Album Pictures

Album Pictures are located in the album directory and are named "albumart.jpg/png" or "folder.jpg/png". Additionally "cover.jpg" is allowed. Other file names, including "Folder.jpg" e.g., are ignored.

In case of a missing picture the largest embedded one (if any) is extracted and stored in a new image file. The file name is configurable. If necessary and configured via settings, it is scaled down, while, if configured, the original picture is saved as ".backup".

If configured, existing album pictures are also downscaled and the original file saved.

If configured, existing album pictures are renamed.

Large album pictures slow down album browsing. Thus 500 pixels limit are preconfigured, like in Android system. Contrarily to Android pictures of 501 pixels are not scaled to 250, but to 500. Android always halves the size until the picture fits.

Limitations

Picture files like "AlbumArt.jpg" currently cannot be renamed to "albumart.jpg".

Write access to SD card or USB memory is forbidden in Android. Use the SAF scanner instead.

Technical

The main functionality is written in C++, so called "native code".

The program uses the C++ library TagLib.

The program does not use Android's SQLite database functions, but contains its own SQLite library.

Theoretically the music database could be used by an arbitrary program. It can even be copied to a computer for analysis, e.g. using some "DB Browser".

External Licenses

TagLib C++ Library:

Source: https://taglib.org/

License: LGPL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/lesser.html) and MPL (https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/MPL/1.1/)

SQLite C Library:

Source: https://www.sqlite.org/

License: https://www.sqlite.org/copyright.html


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