Emby – Absolutely Baching

Emby Episode 4

Posted on 1st February 202212th February 2022 by hjr

To recap the story so far: I organise my music on disk in a Composer/Genre/Composition hierarchy. I sometimes play music via the Emby Media Server. Emby does not, however, really support a Composer/Genre/Composition hierarchy, tending to go directly from Composer to Composition. Fortunately, if you use Folders view, Emby will mirror your physical layout of files and folders on disk exactly. But -and this is the point we reached in the last post- Composer artwork you may have applied to Emby's Artist View doesn't display in the Folders view... but, if you arrange for JPGs of each composer to be present in each composer folder, named precisely the same as the folder, it will display composer artwork in Folders view automatically.

This gets us 90% of the way to a usable Emby interface -but, unfortunately, it leaves us with some fairly ugly display screens to wade through on the way to finding a particular piece of music to play. [...]

Fixing Emby

Posted on 30th January 2022 by hjr

To begin with, a bit of a recap of the past two blog pieces.

I began this mini-series by reiterating the way I catalogue my music. Fundamentally, it's just organised in Composer/Genre/Composition order. Then, in the second episode, I explained how I used Emby Media Server to share my music around the house, to the car and to overseas hotel rooms... but that Emby didn't honour the cataloguing hierarchy I'd adopted, but instead simply displayed things in Composer/Composition order, missing out the Genre. This was a failing I could live with, though, since Emby isn't the main way I listen to music. [...]

A word about Emby

Posted on 29th January 202229th January 2022 by hjr

Sometimes, it takes someone asking a question to make you realise you've been doing something dumb for quite a long time! This post will tell the story of one such question, realisation and (most importantly) the fix! So, my thanks to Jeff in advance for having asked the question that made me realise I've been doing Emby wrong all these years!

But first, of course, I have to explain what 'Emby' is! Well, it's a mostly-free, but not open source, media server. You install it on a spare computer and it catalogues whatever media files you point it at. They can be music, photographs or videos -so Emby can manage a collection of movies or photo albums as well as a large classical music collection. By the power of networking, this Emby server makes the assorted media it knows about available to any other device that you can point at it. These Emby clients can be nothing more complex than a web browser, but they can also be dedicated apps, available for all sorts of operating systems and devices. To put it as simply as I can, then, Emby lets my carefully-curated music collection be accessed from a phone in a car; or from a laptop in a Polish hotel when I'm on holiday; or from a new Android tablet I might be using when score-reading in the garden. [...]