Virtual filesystem to browse music/videos etc

[Sipos]

I have a load of music which is currently stored in directories for each artist, with sub-directories for each album. I'd like to be able to browse it by other attributes as well i.e. by genre or by year, also as directories in a filesystem (kind of how you browse for music on an iPod). Ideally, I'd be able to share this using samba too.

I could write a script that extracts all of the information from the ID3 tags and uses it to make symbolic links to every file in a different set of directories for each view but, this seems a bit messy. Ideally I'd like to be able to make a database of the attributes I am interested in and then have a virtual filesystem that creates a directory hierarchy based on the results of SQL quires run on the DB. Has anyone used anything like that?

[NeddySeagoon]

Sipos,

Investigate mediatomb. Its a UPnP media server with all of your media indexed in a database.
Provided your media is already tagged with one of the rag formats it understands, it justworks.

UPnP is understood by windows but the only application I can find for it on XP is XBMC. VLC on XP does not have UPnP support.
Be sure that UPnP is blocked by your firewall. You don't want the entire internet connected to your media server.
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

[avx]

Neddy, UPnP won't solve his problem/wishes, unless there's a frontend making the data available as a file-system. At least that's the way I understood the OP, not wanting a special application but making use of the data via standard tools(ls, grep, etc).

I'm interested in this, too, but I've yet have to find something like that - if there's already something, I'm pretty sure it's based on FUSE.

Edit, found these two, didn't try, yet, but from the description, they might just work:
https://gna.org/projects/tagsfs
http://www.pytagsfs.org/
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[Sipos]

You're right that MediaTomb isn't exactly what I was looking for but, it probably does what I really want and is probably easiest so, I may just go with that. Thanks for the Suggestion NeddySeagoon.

In the meantime, I've found movemetafs and Tagsistant which, without having investigated them properly yet, seem to be along the right lines but not exactly what I was looking for. They are all based on FUSE.

I guess what I want is a virtual filesystem where I can specify directories that it contains in a text file. The directories should either contain more subdirectories listed in the config file, or, it should use a SQL query that returns the names of files and a path. The files would be soft links to their corresponding path. Finally, it should also be able to get the names of sub-directories from a SQL query and, for each one, use another query for contents with a place-holder for the name of the directory in question.

I guess that I'll probably use MediaTomb for the moment and, maybe at some point in the future, I'll have a go at making what I really want using FUSE.