Streaming music from cloud storage

[simoncn]

I will be interested to hear whether you are able to find a workable cloud-based solution. Ideally this would look like a network drive mounted via an SMB connection.

(25-11-2023 17:47)GrumpyPatzer Wrote:  1. When MinimSever scans a music library, is it able to access an individual file’s tag information without loading the whole file?

MinimServer reads only as much of the file as is needed to read the audio information and tag information. For most file formats, this information is at the start of the file. In a few cases, tag information can be at the end of the file. If so, MinimServer seeks to this point in the file rather than reading all the intervening data. How well this seek performs depends on the file system.

Quote:(I’m assuming it must be, given how quickly the scan seems to be done even with spinning disks on my NAS although, for cloud storage to work, rclone or similar would also have to be capable of reading just the necessary part of a file without having to locally cache the whole thing.)

Quite a lot of work has gone into fine-tuning this.

Quote:2. Can MinimServer persist the information it obtains from scanning the music library across reboots?

When the first scan has completed, all the information that has been read is stored in a local cache file on disk. A subsequent rescan reads this cache file in tandem with scanning the library. For each file in the library, if the file size and last modified date match those in the cache entry for the file, the cached information in loaded and no data is read from the file. Any new library files not found in the cache are read (as described above) and their file data is added to the cache. Any files in the cache but no longer in the library have their cache data deleted. Rescanning in this way is typically about 10x faster than the initial scan. Again, quite a lot of work has gone into fine-tuning this.

There is no automatic rescanning in MinimServer. After any change to the library, the user must rescan manually. This is different from Twonky, which spends a lot of CPU resource watching for file changes and rescanning when it detects a change.