[REQ] exclude media from various apps? - Android Software Development

I haven't found any way to do the following. (Please correct me if I've passed over anything)
But I'm looking for both a music and gallery app, that allows me to choose the directory path that I only want those respective apps to scan. I.e. if I wanted to exclude my downloads folder from showing up in the gallery. Or my saved voicemail folder from showing up in music.
Honestly I'd love this to be native functionality I'm afraid it's not, but if it could be worked into cm7
Anyway if you have any ideas on how to achieve this, please chime in!

in your sdcard try to find a ".nomedia" file and just copy and past that into any directory you dont want media to be picked up from

unfortunately I don't think that will work for what I want.
Here's an example:
as a result of my ocd like tendencies for music organization, every folder of an album has a jpg or png of the album art in it. (yes I could delete this file, but I'd prefer to leave it on account of being stubborn and I think that's how my album art shows up in the music player.)
If I put the .nomedia file into that, I would lose the image from showing up in my gallery app, but it would also stop the music from showing up in the music player, wouldn't it?
That is why I would love to have the option to have my music (from settings) only search my "music" folder, and have gallery only search "dcim" and say "downloads" folder.
I know this is kind of nitpicky, but I really think it should be an option. Maybe I'm not so much looking for an instant solution, but rather others opinion on whether or not this should be available functionality.
Also correct me if I'm wrong about the .nomedia file in the above mentioned instance.

Late night bump.
Am I really the only one bothered by this?

If you have a .nomedia file in a folder, it will be excluded from music and gallery searching. There is no way to choose specific folders to include with stock apps, so just create an empty file with that name in the folders you want to skip.
Delete the album art JPG/PNG files; all modern music players for PC allow you to save album art to the media a tag instead of a seperate file. The seperate file is proprietary Microsoft invented crap.
Sent from my HTC Wildfire using Tapatalk

Thanks, deleting the files worked. I'm just trying to remember when and how I embedded the album art into the songs
I still think android could improve how it handles media. But maybe that's just me.

Give MediaMonkey a go, if you're as fussed about your music collection as I you will fall in love the batch tagging and organizing features are unmatched.
Edit: If you want to use autosync/autoconvert in MM it will require the paid registration for gold features. Also, AAC encoder is an extra paid addon... but it can encode MP3 and WMA native. It does ogg, but ogg has non-standard album art embedding... which Android doesn't pick up.
Edit: if you want just a batch converter that can embed album art, try dbpoweramp - mature, industry proven, and also freeware. Its miles ahead the bloatware/shovelware converters out there!
Sent from my HTC Wildfire using Tapatalk

I'll definitely look into it thank you

Related

Music Issues?

I have this issue where my music seems to be in a great mess. Is it possible to somehow set the media player to view music folder by folder?
Perhaps you need to tag it properly? Mp3tag is a good program for that, if that is indeed the problem...
Erm...are there any guides for tagging? Because I have no idea what that is. Even though I placed the songs I wanted to together into the same album, I ended up with multiple albums with different songs but same album name,
Well
Computers are like me, anal perfectionists. The name "This is an album" and "This Is An Album" an "This is an album" are 3 totally different things. If they are not correctly tagged, with EXACTLY the same name, they are not the same as far as the phone is concerned.
Tagging is simple, use mp3 tag, loads your songs and fill in the form fields (album, arsits, title ,etc then save. Make sure they are identical for each song by same artist/in same album.
To help make sure, select all similar tracks of the same artist or album together before you fill in that field, that way you ensure the exact same data is input in all of them.
Although it makes little to no difference to WM player I also sort my music into folders.
Music +
......|
......|
......+Artist1+
......|.......|
......|.......|
......|.......+Album1
......|.......+Album2
......|
......+Artist2+
..............|
..............|
..............+Album1
..............+Album2
..............+Album3
It's just good housekeeping more than anything and keeps things tidy and simple. Besides, some other program (S2P)actually sort by folder in their library view.
P.S. I also recommend mp3tag, it's pretty close to perfect.
Ah...wait...you mean for the music to be in the same album, the artist must be the same? So exactly what are the factors that determine the music being in the same folder? (It goes by artists? Not by albums? And you mentioned titles. How can the titles be the same for all the music?)
Oh and despite the fact that I changed the tags for the albums, it somehow remains the same in itunes and the Media XPerience Panel. Oh and this is how I change tags. I highlight the whole set of music I want to place in the same album. I right click and press "extended tags". I then edit from there. Is that right? What do things like export/convert etc. do? (Oh and I do save.)
Only if you group them that way, of course if the artists are different just make sure the Album is exactly thesame on each track. I for example keep all compliation/etc albums in an artist called "Various".
That's the issue! I have edited the songs I want together by placing them into the same album by using "extend tag". And yet, The album cannot be found on the Media Xperiance and the Itunes.
No need
You shouldn't need to use the advanced tags, in fact I removed everything from advanced tags that was non standard leaving only album, artist, title, genre and maybe year. I also found that if I edited them directly on the card it didn't work. They aren't updated. I moved them to the PC, edited, deleted any files related to library on the phone then moved the music back.
I don't understand very well your question, because if you choose Menu - Open File - and then select your folder, but don't open it, click on "Read", it reads the files that are in the folder you selected.
But I recommend you doing playlists from your PC with Windows Media Player and synchronize them with your phone. Or there is a nice freeware, MPlayListManager which can create playlists directly on your phone.
Anyone have a Mac solution to this? I use iTunes as my library manager but it seems to me the music information isn't edited by iTunes.

Album covers show up in the gallery app - Is there a way to prevent this?

Hello.
Does someone know a way of hidding the album covers showing up in the gallery app? I know the way of putting a ".nomedia" file inside the music folder but that prevents the music from showing up in the music app.
Thank you for your help.
I would also like to know if there is any answer for this? It is irritating to go into gallery and sort through a couple of hundred pictures of my albums.
Embed the art into the mp3 files themselves so you con remove the JPG art files.
There is only one way I know off to stop this and it means going through your music comprehensively.
You need to edit the music files in iTunes or similar, and assign the album art to the individual music tracks rather than just copying a .jpg to the folder.
If you right click on the music file or files (you can edit more than one track at a time) and then click on 'albumart'.
you then find the file you wish to use and click okay.
EACH track then has an assigned album art picture embedded.
It takes time though, I've done 120Gb of my 300Gb of Music!!
21000 tracks and counting so far.................
Personally, I use TagRunner. Downloads the tags and art automatically (and embeds it).
IMO Weak workarounds.
Pisses me off the Gallery wont let you select specific folders.
I once dled a sign language App only to suddenly have 100+ pics in my gallery.
Id you .hide them...the App wont see them either.
Terrible setup by Android , no idea why this hasnt been addressed.
Super noob question,I can't figure out how to add music to my n1.I hooked it up to my PC,do I need software to sync up to? Thanks
class01 said:
Super noob question,I can't figure out how to add music to my n1.I hooked it up to my PC,do I need software to sync up to? Thanks
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
drag and drop after you mount your sd card
Um, you guys know that you can just drop a file called .nomedia in any directory and the music/picture/video finder won't index it, right?
Yes that was discussed. but if the album art is in the same folder as the music, you dont get to listen to the music. And if you put that file in the albumthumbs folder, then the music player wont show it either.
OP is looking to eliminate it from the gallery only.
Are the music files and artwork in the same folder?
If they are you can't do anything about it.
Properly tag the files folks...
Now if the artwork is in another folder you can make a 1 byte file with the name ".nomedia" and place it in the folder.
None of the Media Scan routines will process the folder; this means in the folder images *AND* music will be ignored.
Placing the .nomedia file in whatever folder has the images (music folder or albumthumbs) will most likely prevent the album are from being seen in the music player as well.
I agree that properly tagging the music is really the best way around this. I use mediamonkey for my media management and tagging on my desktop.
SilentMobius said:
Um, you guys know that you can just drop a file called .nomedia in any directory and the music/picture/video finder won't index it, right?
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Click to collapse
I'm doing this, when I rename the file, it vanishes. Is this right? If I try make it again, it says it can't as a file with that name exists, so I guess that's how it should be.
When I go to album, these folders are still there though. Is there a way to make it refresh?
EDIT: Okay, I rebooted and this worked

Gallery view showing music album thumbnails!

I go into Gallery to view my albums of pics and unfortunately it not only puts a folder in the gallery for each folder of pictures I have but also for every single album or single in my phone/memory card (album art). uggggh I don't see any settings to disable that or omit certain folders. any hacks?
Yeah, I've got the same issue. Furthermore, the music app shows all of my additional ringtones and notification sounds. Haven't found a fix yet.
Sent from my SGH-T959 using XDA App
Same issue here, but to be fair I don't think it is a Vibrant issue, it's a general Android thing. My G1 always did this too pre and post froyo... I never bothered to figure out a fix though.
yeah I had this issue on my G1 also. Nothing new. I wish there was a filter setting or a watch-folder setting
mine does NOT put the album art in the gallery. i have my music on the sdcard in a folder called MUSIC
but my music app does give me every sound under the sun. it's annoying because i am now FORCED to make playlists without the erroneous phone sounds. never had to do that before. ;/
android's going on 2 years old and El Goog has still completely ignored these little bugs
southpaw773 said:
android's going on 2 years old and El Goog has still completely ignored these little bugs
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Click to collapse
It's not a bug. A bug would be if the gallery app was *designed* to NOT show certain images. It's not. it's designed to show every image on the storage drives. It's a poor design, not a bug.
the Gallery just needs to have the ability to hide certain folders and files so you do not see them... Has been an issue for me since my G1 and 1.0!!
Hopefully your album art is in a different folder than your music. If so, stick a .nomeda file in the folder. (Just use notepad and save as type "all files" so it doesn't add a .txt to the end.) Works for hiding sound files too.
I don't have any album art showing in my gallery because I embed the album art in to each MP3 file's meta data. Use something like MP3 tag to do it (Winamp I think does it too). If you use WMP to Sync music like I do, the music player doesn't see most album art anyway. It's best to just embed the image in to the meta data.
Here's the solution:
rename all the .jpg in the music folders "Folder.jpg". This works for me. I'm assuming of course you have one folder for each album and each folder has 1 pic file for the cover art.
jkcheng122 said:
Here's the solution:
rename all the .jpg in the music folders "Folder.jpg". This works for me. I'm assuming of course you have one folder for each album and each folder has 1 pic file for the cover art.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
The best way to do it is to use something like MP3Tag to embed the album art in each MP3 file. This makes sure each song has the album part showing up. That way the gallery doesn't index your album art as well.
coolguy949 said:
The best way to do it is to use something like MP3Tag to embed the album art in each MP3 file. This makes sure each song has the album part showing up. That way the gallery doesn't index your album art as well.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Hmm I might do this for the misc singles that are placed in a single folder. Yay for more things to kill time at work with. Thanks.
coolguy949 said:
The best way to do it is to use something like MP3Tag to embed the album art in each MP3 file. This makes sure each song has the album part showing up. That way the gallery doesn't index your album art as well.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
OMG I discovered MP3Tag yesterday. AMAZING. Thank you for this tip!
here try this: gallery excluder app
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1063358
it excludes wht u want to and not!
I've stopped using the gallery and uninstalled it. Moved onto an app called Just Pictures, you can hide and exclude folders and pictures and such.
And Music i've gotten rid of the stock music player and just run MIUI player. Has the option to exclude files under a certain size (good for avoiding ringtones).
on CM7 the following works:
using the stock file manager, go to the folder which contains the files you don't want to appear in the gallery / music player. Then go to settings and there you have "exclude from media scan".
.nomedia file in the folder...simple
movieaddict said:
here try this: gallery excluder app
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1063358
it excludes wht u want to and not!
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
This is the quickest and best app ever.
Sdobron said:
.nomedia file in the folder...simple
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Click to collapse
Which will keep it from seeing ANY media in the folder, like your MP3s...
Definitely best to embed the album art in the MP3.

Album Cover Art

Can someone please tell me the best way to save album art? Everytime I update or change roms I lose the cover art. Now I am currently using "Cover Art Downloader" which will automatically find the covers in batch mode when you want, but I was wondering if there is a way to save it with the music on the ext. sd card. Does anyone know how to do this?
I am using the same app. I don't think there's a way to save them. Every time I flash a new rom I have to redownload them too. Its a pain!
Sent from my SGH-T959
If you sort music by album, there's a way to do:
You can grab the album cover pic from amazon, scan it yourself, or search, and put it to corresponding folder with audio files.
I did the same thing and I have album cover on every album folder.
I use mediamonkey to organize my mp3s and it has the ability to embed the cover art into the mp3 itself so it always stays with the music. Media monkey also has the ability to sync playlists using the media player usb mode on the phone.
where do you get media monkey? i don't see it in the market.
roly17 said:
where do you get media monkey? i don't see it in the market.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Yea, you wouldn't - it is a PC application.
It also has the ability to reencode all your music on the fly while transferring. I keep all my music in archive quality MP3 and Flac files, but I don't want it to take up that much space on my phone, so I have it automatically transcode everything to 64Kbps WMA on transfer, which sounds ok in my cheap earbuds anyhow. The downside is that I lose my embedded album art, so keep in mind that the embedded album art and the transcoding to save space are mutually exclusive if you use Media Monkey. Both features are great, you just have to pick which one is more important to you.
mingkee said:
If you sort music by album, there's a way to do:
You can grab the album cover pic from amazon, scan it yourself, or search, and put it to corresponding folder with audio files.
I did the same thing and I have album cover on every album folder.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Just be aware that if you do this, all the album cover pictures will now show up in the gallery which kind of sucks if you have a lot of albums.
what does music player look for?
Where does the music player look for album art, and where? An image file with the same album name? It is ok with embedded art too?
If you use poweramp it will just re dl the set for you or you can manually do it through album art app. I know this didn't answer you exactly but it's a solution
Don't blame me, blame my keyboard's autocorrection algorithm.
shrapnelx said:
Just be aware that if you do this, all the album cover pictures will now show up in the gallery which kind of sucks if you have a lot of albums.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I had this same issue and my way around that was to delete all of my old cover art and then use "Album Art Grabber" from the Market, which collects everything automatically and puts it into 1 folder.
In the end, I have 1 folder in "My Gallery" with all of my album artwork and everything is nicely organized in one place. I also think you can choose the folder you want to save your artwork to....At the very least, you could always copy the artwork folder and place it wherever you want (SD Card or Internal HD).
Hope that helps!
- Mat
shrapnelx said:
Just be aware that if you do this, all the album cover pictures will now show up in the gallery which kind of sucks if you have a lot of albums.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
.nomedia - As in create a file named .nomedia in the folder and nothing from that folder will show up in the gallery.
T313C0mun1s7 said:
.nomedia - As in create a file named .nomedia in the folder and nothing from that folder will show up in the gallery.
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Click to collapse
Won't that also keep your MP3s in the folder from showing up in the music player?
Sent from my GT-I9000 using XDA App
If you guys dont mind spending a little money Poweramp does all this automatically.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H1UO6DakowM
I listen to mostly hiphop and r&b and the audio is great. I plug it up to my car auido jack and sounds amazing through my ported subs. Also really good thru headsets.
I personally started using this program when stock android and touchwiz music player was playing the audio from installed games, ringtones, some videos, movies, and podcast.
This program only plays music form the folders you select. THis works great with the vibrant having 2 seperate memory cards. Because I have music in the internal/external.
Edit: I also wanted to add that cover art got on my nerves when I have atleast 100 albums on my sd cards. Its not always simple as adding a picture to the album folder. You usually have to rename them to Cover.jpg/Cover.jpeg/Albumart.jpg etc. I have majority of my music on my external 16gb and it had compatibility problems when having certain albums in the same folder. Poweramp takes care of all of that. I dont pay for a ton of apps but this one I would recommend.
if you get the "donate" version of cover art downloader, there is an option in the settings to "embed cover art into id3 tag (mp3 only).
shrapnelx said:
Won't that also keep your MP3s in the folder from showing up in the music player?
Sent from my GT-I9000 using XDA App
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I don't believe so because it is a flag used by the gallery app, not the music player app. Any application can behave however it is programmed of course, but most picture apps honor the file and most multimedia apps don't.
The best way is also the biggest pain-in-the-butt way.
Use a computer program on a desktop computer to embed the album art into the mp3 itself. Then transfer the mp3 files back to your vibrant.
I use MP3 Tagger, which also lets me correct MP3 ID data.
It is a work in progress for me. I have done all of my mp3 files beginning with 'A' and 'B'.
At my current pace I should be done in about 5 years.
T313C0mun1s7 said:
I don't believe so because it is a flag used by the gallery app, not the music player app. Any application can behave however it is programmed of course, but most picture apps honor the file and most multimedia apps don't.
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I'm positive the .nomedia file will keep audio from showing up in the music player. I did this to keep lets golf sounds and other game sounds from showing up there. So that file would keep the image from showing up in the gallery, but also the mp3's wouldn't show up in music player either.
Sent from my GT-I9000 using XDA Premium App

how to organize music into folders that i want?

ok so basically i organize certain music into certain folders the way i want to listen to them. sometimes i don't even organize them by the same genre. it's just a personal preference. in IOS, i would just make a respective playlist for each folder and i would have my music organized the way i want.
however on my nexus 4, even when i transfer my music by the folders i made, it i would just use the metadata and organize the music the way it wants, totally ruining my structure. how can i make it so the music would stay in whatever folder i put it in?
Uh like you said. You need to properly tag your music files, then make playlists.
Or use a file explorer and play/launch your music through folders. (Lame)
Sent from my Nexus 4 using xda premium
nxt said:
Uh like you said. You need to properly tag your music files, then make playlists.
Or use a file explorer and play/launch your music through folders. (Lame)
Sent from my Nexus 4 using xda premium
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Click to collapse
so sad....tagging my music won't help because it will still use other meta data to organize the music is a stupid way (according to me that is)
i thought android was better and had much more freedom and now i finally use it, i'm discovering alot of annoyances, and even flaws since some features are discarded. oh well, i guess there are plus and minuses to both OSes, so far i still like ios more. but let me use the nexus 4 for a couple of weeks before the final judgement
I really don't understand what you are doing but android doesn't move music files into any folders that I am aware of on its own once they are on the phone. If you used a file explorer they should be on phone exactly where you put them. The music player, any of them as they all work pretty much the same, can display the music files by artists, album, genres or playlists but not by special folder names. For instance say you setup your music in a folder called hip hop, the music player can only show you the artists and albums in there but not the folder itself because that isn't how they are setup to work but the hip hop folder will still be in the same place you put it. Personally I prefer WMP, tried iTunes and hated it, to sync my music playlists to my phone and don't really worry with how it is organized (by artist and album as that's default for anything) as long as the playlists work and sync properly.
Yeah, what exactly is your issue? It doesn't make sense.
If your metadata is screwed up, that's fine, just copy your music into folders how you want.
Then use any of the millions of file explorers available on the market to view your folders and tap on the music you want to play and it'll launch in your default music player (or its own).
Anyways, there's plenty of alternatives you can do with metadata.
If you have an mp3 named track01.mp3 u can name it whatever u want with id3/metadata name the artist "britney spears" and it'll show up as britney spears in the music app.
Or if you have a bunch of random songs and u want it to be "rage music" make the artist on all of them "RAGE MUSIC" or name the album "RAGE MUSIC" then it's all there.
Or like I said previously, properly tag your songs and make playlists like you did with itunes.
I think what it is is that the iPhone displays music with a file browser and not a music player and that's why you can see specially named folders. Don't know as I've never owned one and it doesn't really appeal to me.
Edit: Nope just looked at someone iPhone at work, it opens up a music player just like android. But it must have some type of file browsing ability if it can show folders not conventionally named.
In what format are you storing your metadata? I use ID3v2 tags so that the information is imbedded into the mp3, particularly the album art, and travels with it from device to device. Not sure what Apple supports.
kzoodroid said:
Edit: Nope just looked at someone iPhone at work, it opens up a music player just like android. But it must have some type of file browsing ability if it can show folders not conventionally named.
In what format are you storing your metadata? I use ID3v2 tags so that the information is imbedded into the mp3, particularly the album art, and travels with it from device to device. Not sure what Apple supports.
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Yeah iphone does NOT do folder browsing in the itunes app. No idea what the OP is talking about. He can do whatever he wants to do and better if he does it all with id3 tags. or simply use a real file browser.

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