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Flacbox Guide: Music Library

Easy Music Library Management: Effortlessly organize your music library. You have two options for building your collection: manual addition or automatic synchronization.


Manual Addition: To add tracks manually, tap "Add music," then select folders/files from your connected cloud services or your device. This method creates links to your tracks, preserving the original files' locations to save disk space. For offline access, use the download action or enable offline mode for playlists and track collections.

Add music

Quick Access Section: At the top of the music library menu, you'll find a quick access section with links to your favorites, recent tracks, and audio bookmarks:

Favorites: Mark songs as favorites from the audio player screen or the options menu.

Recents: Browse recently played tracks.

Bookmarks: Create and manage audio bookmarks while a song is playing. Detailed instructions on working with audio bookmarks can be found here.

music library

Continue Playback: This feature restores your audio player queue to its last saved position if enabled in application settings.


Organized Library Categories: All the tracks in your library are thoughtfully grouped by source types and music tags:


Online music: Discover online music from your cloud services.

Offline music: Access offline music available for playback, sourced from the local files section.

Music on this iPhone/iPad/Mac: Explore music imported into the application from your iPhone, iPad, or Mac.


Songs, Albums, Artists, Genres, Composers: help you organize your tracks by music tags.


Search: Use the search feature to quickly find any song, artist, album, or genre in your music library.


More Actions Menu: Tap the three dots button to access the more actions menu, which includes the "Settings" option for configuring your music library settings.

music library settings

Metadata Synchronization: When you add tracks to your library, the metadata reader gets to work. This background process reads all metadata from your tracks and organizes them by Artist, Album, Genre, and Composer. You have the flexibility to adjust the speed of metadata reading to load data faster, but be aware that this may use more energy. You can also disable the metadata reader and display file names instead of tag information. Importantly, the metadata reader only updates metadata in your music library and does not alter the files stored in your cloud account or local storage. If you wish to edit metadata for audio files, you can do so using the built-in tags editor, which you can activate from the corresponding action in the options menu. When the background synchronization checkbox is checked, the metadata reader works in background mode. However, please note that if the application consumes significant energy in the background during audio playback, the iOS operating system may suspend the app. So, if you have a large music collection, it's advisable to use the desktop version of the application for metadata synchronization. You can then use the data backup and restore feature to transfer the synchronized music library from the desktop, which is available in app settings. The 'Reload metadata' action will flag all files in your music library as having missing metadata, triggering the metadata reader to refresh the metadata for every file in your music library.

Metadata Synchronization

Online Music Synchronization: Automatic online music sync allows you to add tracks to your library automatically. To activate this feature, head to music library settings and select sync folders.

Online Music Synchronization

With this option enabled, the application scans all selected folders, identifies supported audio files, and seamlessly integrates them into your library. You can start or stop synchronization by tapping on the corresponding menu action.

synchronized online filders selection screen

Online music synchronization operates exclusively when the app is in the foreground, which means synchronization may take some time. To speed up the process, leave your app open, connect it to a power source, and enable 'Screen' -> 'Always active' option in application settings. Alternatively, you can perform online music synchronization on the desktop version of the app and transfer the music library to the iOS version using the data backup restore feature. You can also set how often you want to synchronize your online music library. If you set it to "immediately," online sync will start every time you open the application.

online synchronization time interval

Offline Music Synchronization: This option scans all local folders located in the application's Documents directory to find supported audio files. All these local files are seamlessly added to your music library. Local files located on your device but not within this application must be added to the music library manually, as the app does not have access to files located outside the application Documents directory, as restricted by iOS/MacOS security. It is advisable to periodically initiate offline music synchronization to keep your music library updated with your local files.

Offline Music Synchronization

Personalization: In this section, you can configure the music library screen style to suit your preferences. Three options are available: Plain menu, Grouped menu, Tabbed menu.

Personalization

Album Covers: Here, you can enable the search for album covers on the internet, as well as search for artwork inside your music folders. You can also choose the quality of album covers stored on your device and manage your cached album covers.


Album Covers Settings Screen

Playlists: You can enable the option to add the same song to a playlist twice. By default, this option is disabled.

Playlists Settings

Recents: Within recents settings, you can delete the list of recently played songs.

Recents Settings

Favorites: In the favorites settings, you can enable simultaneous editing of favorites. When this option is enabled, a song will be added to the favorites list in the music library and in the files section simultaneously. You can also delete the list of favorite songs in this section.

Favorites Settings

Delete music library: This action will erase the music library database, but it will leave your music files untouched.


Pagination: By default, the application uses pagination to reduce content loading time. However, you can disable this option and allow the application to load all available data at once. To do so, open application settings, scroll down to "Personalization" -> "Number of items per page," and choose "All items."

Personalization, Number of items per page Screen

Top Toolbar Located just beneath the navigation bar, the top toolbar offers several convenient actions: "Search," "Play all," "Shuffle all," and "Continue playback." You can reveal or hide this toolbar with a simple swipe-down gesture.

Search: Execute a search within the current context.

Play all: Add all tracks from the current page to the player queue, respecting the current sorting order.

Shuffle All: Similar to "Play all," but shuffle the tracks before adding them to the audio player queue.

Continue playback: Restore the last saved audio player state for the current context, provided this feature is enabled in the application settings.

Top Toolbar

Search The search feature empowers you to locate a specific track, artist, album, or genre within your music library. Within the "Search screen," you have access to the following actions: "Sort," "Filter," "Grid/List."


Sort option: Allows you to arrange results by various criteria such as "Song title," "Duration," "Recently added," "Song number," "Album," "Artist," "Album artist," "Genre," "Composer," "Rating," "Year," and "Beats per minute." The available sort options may vary depending on the search context.


Filter: Enables you to select the track source type:

"Offline music" - Music available for offline playback.

"Online music" - Music found in cloud services.

"Music on this device" - Local music imported into the application from your device but stored outside the application's Documents folder.


Grid/List: Lets you switch between table-style and collection-style content presentation.

Music Library Search

Options Menu Each song in your music library boasts a menu with more actions, accessed by tapping the three dots button near the song title. These actions vary depending on whether it's a single song or part of a collection.

For Individual Songs:

Play next: Adds the song to the top of the player queue.

Play later: Appends the song to the bottom of the player queue.

Add to playlist: Includes the song in a playlist; you can also create a new playlist from the subsequent screen.

Add to favorites: Marks the song as a favorite for quick access.

Download: Saves the song to local files. It appears in the "Local Files" tab and the "Offline music" section.

Edit audio tags: Opens the built-in audio tags editor to fix missing metadata; note that this will alter the song on your storage.

Show in folder: Reveals the folder where the audio file is stored.

Show in Finder: For files imported from your Mac, this action reveals the folder where the audio file is located on your Mac.

Open in: Exports the audio file to another app.

Delete from cloud service: Removes the file from both the music library and cloud storage, and please note that this action is irreversible.

Delete from music library: Deletes the song from your music library, but the file remains in storage. If automatic sync is enabled and the file exists on remote storage, it will reappear in your library after a sync operation.


Song Options Menu

For Song Collections (e.g., Albums, Artists, Genres, Composers):

Play all: Replaces the player queue with songs from the selected collection.

Play next: Adds the songs from this collection to the top of the player queue.

Play later: Appends the songs from this collection to the bottom of the player queue.

Add to playlist: Includes songs from this collection in a playlist, with the option to create a new playlist.

Enable offline mode: Downloads songs from this collection to local files. These downloaded songs will appear in the "Local Files" tab and the "Offline music" section of your Music Library. If new items are added to the collection on the server, they will be downloaded automatically to "Local Files."

Edit image: Allows you to change the album cover for the song collection.

Delete from music library: Removes the song collection from your music library. However, this action does not delete the actual files from storage. If automatic sync is enabled and the files exist on remote storage, they will reappear in your library after a sync operation.

Songs Collection Options Menu

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