Gnome Music and NFS shares

apastuszak · 2016-03-12 18:45:45

I have all my music on a Linux server in my house, so I can centrally manage it.

I have the directory shared out via NFS and and mount it to /home/username/Music on my Arch laptop.

The Gnome music app only ever shows 4 albums and just refuses to update. I installed Lollypop, and it does see all the music, but it takes FOREVER for the music library to update every time I launch it.

I did set up mpd and gmpc and have been using that, but I kind of like Gnome Music and would like to get it working.

Any ideas on how to get Gnome Music to see all my files?

doggone · 2016-03-15 03:14:52

GNOME Music uses Tracker as its backend. If it's not finding your music I suggest you look there. I'm sure there's some information on the wiki about it (perhaps on the GNOME page). Anyway you can try tracker-preferences and man tracker.

Some comments that are beside the point:
I tried using a network share for my music for a while, but in practice I find it really inconvenient (things like slowness and no inotify support). Now I rsync my music between my pc and my NAS.
I agree that GNOME's Music app looks splendid, and so does Lollypop, but in the end I can't use anything but mpd and ncmpcpp. mpd simply works best.

fukawi2 · 2016-03-15 03:22:13

apastuszak wrote:

I have the directory shared out via NFS and and mount it to /home/username/Music on my Arch laptop.
.... it takes FOREVER for the music library to update every time I launch it.

NFS isn't known for it's performance; wireless is only going to lower that even further.

http://serverfault.com/questions/574883/nfs-over-wifi-very-slow wrote:

NFS doesn't do well with the lossy, up-and-down nature of wireless connections. At the very best, you'll have poor performance. With a typical wireless connection, you'll have atrocious performance, corrupted files, hung mounts, and perhaps worse.
If you need to access storage over wifi, use a different protocol that is a bit more resilient to network issues. CIFS, AFS, Samba, etc. will all do much better than NFS.

Perhaps try syncing the music locally, or at least trying another network protocol, to see if (part of) the problem is NFS. I like to sync my music locally to all my devices using Syncthing personally.

apastuszak · 2016-03-15 03:22:26

Right now I am running an Ampache server in my house that houses all my music. All the phones and tablets in the house (mine, the wife, and 2 kids) all stream their music from the server.

My library is about 80 GB worth of FLAC files, and Ampache auto transcodes to ogg vorbis before it streams to save on bandwidth costs. You can also pin music while on wifi to force cache it.

I do have mpd set up, and that's what I am using regularly now. I have mpd point to the nfs share and it works pretty good. The only annoying part is that I need to do a kill -9 every time my laptop wakes from suspend, cause mpd seriously gets messed up when a suspend and resume happens.

Another good program I have used is Viridian. It's Linux GTK+ client for Ampache. Only issues with it are:

1. It's Python 2
2. It's GTK 2+
3. It isn't in AUR
4. It's been a long time since it has been updated.

apastuszak · 2016-03-15 03:25:04

fukawi2 wrote:

apastuszak wrote:
I have the directory shared out via NFS and and mount it to /home/username/Music on my Arch laptop.
.... it takes FOREVER for the music library to update every time I launch it.
NFS isn't known for it's performance; wireless is only going to lower that even further.
http://serverfault.com/questions/574883/nfs-over-wifi-very-slow wrote:
NFS doesn't do well with the lossy, up-and-down nature of wireless connections. At the very best, you'll have poor performance. With a typical wireless connection, you'll have atrocious performance, corrupted files, hung mounts, and perhaps worse.
If you need to access storage over wifi, use a different protocol that is a bit more resilient to network issues. CIFS, AFS, Samba, etc. will all do much better than NFS.
Perhaps try syncing the music locally, or at least trying another network protocol, to see if (part of) the problem is NFS. I like to sync my music locally to all my devices using Syncthing personally.

My library is too large to sync around everywhere. I'd prefer to keep it centralized. I think mpd is probably the best solution for me currently.

apastuszak · 2016-04-14 03:08:48

Well, Gnome Music still can't see music mounted to ~/Music. But I did try out Lollypop. I used it before, but it took a very long time to load my music library off of an NFS or a SMB share. I'm not sure what exactly has changed; if it's a Lollypop update or the update to Gnome 3.20, but updates are much faster. They used to 10-15 minutes on my library. Now they take, at most 2 minutes. Still have mpd up and running, but I really like the Lollypop UI.

Hopefully someone will make a nice Gnome 3 MPD client. I really love the GtkHeaderBar widget. I go out of my way to find apps that support it. I think it's just a brilliant use of the window title bar.

Arch Linux

#1 2016-03-12 18:45:45

Gnome Music and NFS shares

#2 2016-03-15 03:14:52

Re: Gnome Music and NFS shares

#3 2016-03-15 03:22:13

Re: Gnome Music and NFS shares

#4 2016-03-15 03:22:26

Re: Gnome Music and NFS shares

#5 2016-03-15 03:25:04

Re: Gnome Music and NFS shares

#6 2016-04-14 03:08:48

Re: Gnome Music and NFS shares

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