Automatic rescans

[wotgorilla]

Hello all,

First of all, I must say I discovered MinimServer only a few months ago and so far I have been extremely pleased with the versatilty and intelligence of this software. I have installed it on my Synology DS918+ and it worked straight out of the box. This is by far the best DLNA server I have used in my life. I am using it mostly to feed my Bose Smart Speaker 500 and controlling it with Hifi Cast on Android. I especially love the "intelligent browsing" feature which completely changed my opinion about DLNA servers. Thank you Simon!

I read on the MinimServer 2 page (https://minimserver.com/minimserver2.html) that version 2 enhancements include "a simple way to find albums that have been added recently to your library, improvements to rescanning and much more."

What does this mean exactly? I have been looking all around the website and forum for information about rescanning and it isn't always clear whether the documentation or discussions refer to MinimServer 2 or a previous version.

So my actual question is: in MinimServer 2, how do I go about updating the database after adding new audio files to my music directory? Is the directory somehow "watched" for changes by MinimServer and files imported automatically?

In case not, is there a way to notify MinimServer externally of an added file, from the shell or using the HTTP API? Or is there a way to rescan only a subdirectory (the same way I run 'mpd update' with the subdirectory as argument)? If I know exactly which files were just added, I would certainly prefer not to force a complete rescan of my collection, as I read that this will a long time to complete, during which the server is not available for playing music.

This may be a trivial question. But I am sure that I am not the only user who wishes to add songs to their music collection while other songs are playing, right? Please enlighten me.

[simoncn]

Welcome to the MinimServer forum!

The paragraph you have seen begins with the words "Future enhancements". These features are not yet available. They are high priority but they both require significant changes to the internals of MinimServer. For this reason, I cannot give a date for when they will be availalbe.

[wotgorilla]

Thank you Simon for the quick reply. I will wait patiently for these upgrades.

In the meantime, does anyone have a suggestion to implement some kind of simple library update mechanism? I have some coding skills and I can write bash scripts.

[simoncn]

(18-03-2021 18:20)wotgorilla Wrote:  In case not, is there a way to notify MinimServer externally of an added file, from the shell or using the HTTP API? Or is there a way to rescan only a subdirectory (the same way I run 'mpd update' with the subdirectory as argument)? If I know exactly which files were just added, I would certainly prefer not to force a complete rescan of my collection, as I read that this will a long time to complete, during which the server is not available for playing music.

I understand that a complete rescan takes longer than you would like, especially with a large library. However, it is not correct that the server is unavailable for playing music during a rescan. You cannot browse for music during a rescan but any tracks already queued for playing in your control point or renderer will continue to play while the rescan is happening.

Quote:In the meantime, does anyone have a suggestion to implement some kind of simple library update mechanism? I have some coding skills and I can write bash scripts.

You can use MinimServer command scripting to trigger a rescan at a specific time of day with a task in Windows Task Scheduler or a Linux cron job. This rescans the whole library. It is not possible to rescan a single subdirectory.

[Alandbush]

(18-03-2021 22:01)wotgorilla Wrote:  In the meantime, does anyone have a suggestion to implement some kind of simple library update mechanism? I have some coding skills and I can write bash scripts.

In addition to Simoncn reply, if you want specifically a scheduled task run on the Synology, refer to Task scheduler and then MinimServer command scripting.