Music Directory Structure

Roksbox can play your music files based on your music directory structure. With this option, you don't need to create a music.xml file. Roksbox will find your music files within your directory structure and make them available to play. You can include poster art for each artist and album in the form of a folder.jpg file.

When using the directory structure option, Roksbox will start at the root folder of your music structure, and scan each subfolder for valid music files. The first level of folders below your root folder will be used as the main categories, and each subfolder that contains one or more music files will be used as a subcategory. The names of the folders will be used as the category names. Any music files in the root directory will not be included.

Roksbox uses an artist/album structure. Folders with your music files will be considered to be an album folder, and the folder directly above will be the artist folder. Each artist folder can have one of more album folders, each with music files corresponding to that album. The artist/album structure can be at the root level, or at any number of levels below the root level.

To include album art, put a folder.jpg album art file in the folder. If you don't have a folder.jpg file, Roksbox will use a default album image.

To use your directory structure to play your music, delete the Music XML Name on the Roksbox Network Settings screen, or do not include a music.xml file in your music root folder. Also, directory listings must be enabled on your web server.

You also must have your web server and setup information working as described in the tutorial, and your music must be accessible from your web server.

Tips:


For very large music collections, it might be somewhat annoying to navigate across the top level categories (artists) if you use the artist/album structure at the music root level. To reduce the amount of navigation, you can create alphabet folders at the root level, such as folder "A", folder "B", folder "C", etc. Then put your artist/album strucures within each folder according to which aphabetic folder the artist falls under. For example, put The Beatles in the "B" folder, put The Eagles in the "E" folder, etc. This way you will have the alphabetic folders along the top, and can easily navigate to whichever folder the artist you want is in, then select that artist and album.

Creating Playlists - There are two ways to create playlists when using the music directory structure option.

  1. Create one or more playlist folders, and copy the songs you want in your playlist into these folders. This will create the playlists in roksbox with the name you give each folder. This method uses additional space on your hard drive.
  2. Use one of the methods under Creating Playlists at Organizing Your Music Files and Preparing Them to Play on Roksbox


Also remember to use "Quick Click" to quickly navigate along the top row. Click your left or right mouse button "quickly" (about two clicks per second) to navigate without having to wait for the poster art to be retrieved and displayed on each click.