[elmasgigante]

I would like to be able to share music albums as folders of mp3 files without having to archive (zip or rar or whatever) the directory. Most music albums are shared as an archive, which is just extra work to make it available as well as after it's downloaded (having to unzip/unrar it). In Azureus (bittorrent client) this is trivial. Has this already been discussed here ? I couldn't find a thread about it.

[Dmnyanks]

You can. Just put your music into a folder and share it. Even better than bittorrent because you don't have to download all the tracks. Also zip files in xp are pretty much the same anyway.

There is nothing the devs can do if people decide to share them as archives.

Ok I know this isn't quite what your after but shareing full folders just isn't required in emule as it is in bittorrent.

[Xhaos]

Nothing should be done to encourage the distribution of single music files, they are usually tagged terribly, poor quality, and there is greater chance of the files being named incorrectly or outright fakes. Also with the 9.28mb chunk size, it is more efficient to download a whole album (ignoring whether you want the whole thing or not). Unpacking an archive is hardly much trouble. I can only see archived albums as beneficial.

But yes, as dmnyanks says you can share a folder. It does mean that the files are not associated with eachother in any way, unlike the BT system.

Quote

Ok I know this isn't quite what your after but shareing full folders just isn't required in emule as it is in bittorrent.

I think you have that the wrong way around

[Dmnyanks]

Xhaos, on Feb 25 2005, 05:20 AM, said:

Quote

Ok I know this isn't quite what your after but shareing full folders just isn't required in emule as it is in bittorrent.

I think you have that the wrong way around

Nope sounds about right to me. However maybe the grammer could be improved.
"Sharing complete folders just isn't required in emule, like it is in bittorent. " better?

[niRRity]

Dmnyanks, on Feb 25 2005, 03:33 PM, said:

Nope sounds about right to me. However maybe the grammer could be improved.
"Sharing complete folders just isn't required in emule, like it is in bittorent. " better? 

Not better because it isn't required in bittorent. The abillity to calculate a single hash for an entire folder is a good and important feature.

[Dmnyanks]

It isn't required it bittorrent? Yet its a good and important feature?

In bittorent I would say it is required because its harder to share lots of smaller files than in emule.

[elmasgigante]

Dmnyanks, on Feb 25 2005, 01:27 PM, said:

It isn't required it bittorrent? Yet its a good and important feature? 

In bittorent I would say it is required because its harder to share lots of smaller files than in emule.

true, so let's stick with emule. i agree with Xhaos that sharing a folder as one item instead of just making the individual files available (which i knew that is possible, thx dmyanks) is important in order to maintain the album's integrity and often helps ensure that the files are of good quality with at least consistent tagging (regardless of its correctness).

similarly i would be glad to share other folders containing software packages but it's just too much trouble to have to prepare them (by eg. zipping them). we're in the unlimited broadband age, why should i worry about zipping only to save some download time ? if the bytesize becomes more than a GB orso perhaps it's worth it to do a little bit of compression, if indeed the compression ratio is significant.

[Dmnyanks]

Whether or not it does become a feature of emule you seem to be having quite a bit of trouble extracting files. I've found that a freeware program called extractnow (search on google) makes it simple.

In the mean time does anybody know if theres a mod with an inbuilt extract function? Could be quite useful.

[Archmage]

BT and eMule have quite a different if you compare the number of files. You could easy download fourthousend of 1kb-Textfiles with BT if this is only one trackerentry, while your eMule would be huge overload with this task.

If you put them into an archive eMule would have a pretty easy job to download this one file.

So mainly you can say, that it would be much easier for eMule if all your MP3s would stay in Archives. So I would suggest to get an music player that can play files in archives like foobar.

[Xhaos]

All eMule feature requests should lead to foobar

[SUGARAT]

The ability (selectable by the user) to share a folder as a item should be implemented, it could have several uses and in general could boost the number of shared files. People could share related files (music, TV Series, Comics, books, ...) without the need of prepare then in archives. I have for example 3 GB of comics in my HDD that I am not sharing because to share it I need to create archived versions, and I have not the HDD space.
The compresion gained archiving is not a factor, eMule already compress the data.

[Carlos113]

IIRC years ago Edonkey had the "collections" feature that allowed to share an entire folder as one file or something like that, I don´t remember if it worked.

I also have a lot of files burned to CD that I would share if I could add them as one single "file" without having to repack them in the HD (not enough space), which would give a new different hash than the one they had when I DL them anyway.

[chocobo2k]

Supporting folders is essential. putting dobule versions of MP3 album to get archived album and non archived album would lead to loss in disk space. And for the foobar users I say: Why limiting myself to this program while there are many audi players better than it not only this but by archiving all my MP3 folders I will have big problems transfering music as single entities for a MP3 player for example.

Some MP3 managers like those with I-River are so limited and you only use them to transfer music and they don't support archives.

Supporting folders is paramount and eMule still lacks this feature. i did not see this article only after makeing new post sorry.

[Xhaos]

The only limits you will find in foobar are the user

[PacoBell]

niRRity, on Feb 25 2005, 08:39 AM, said:

The abillity to calculate a single hash for an entire folder is a good and important feature.

I totally agree. It shouldn't be all that difficult to concatenate the hashes of individual files and hash that. This would work both for the "legacy" hash as well as AICH. This feature should be a high priority for a future revision.

[EDIT]
I believe the best place for the feature would be under the Tools section. It could be called something like "Create collection" or something like that. I would extend the concept of a "collection", however, to include multiple (sub)directories as well. The remote client should also be able to recreate the directory structure upon completion of the collection.
[/EDIT]

This post has been edited by PacoBell: 01 March 2005 - 07:48 AM

[slowsilver]

PacoBell, on Mar 1 2005, 09:34 AM, said:

It shouldn't be all that difficult to concatenate the hashes of individual files and hash that. This would work both for the "legacy" hash as well as AICH. This feature should be a high priority for a future revision.

How can you tell seeing a hash whether it applies to a file or a directory structure?

[PacoBell]

I was thinking the exact same thing not 2 minutes ago I guess you'd have to send a special opcode telling the peer just that.

[slowsilver]

There are also filesizes, filenames and directory structure to be passed along.

[PacoBell]

'Natch. That's what follows the opcode.

[slowsilver]

Who sends the opcode to who and when?