Browsing a server

Activity and Library, shelves, detail pages, and where you left off.

Open Media servers and the server's own content is read live. Two chips split it:

• Activity — shelves of what is recent, popular and part-finished. This is where it opens.
• Library — a grid of the places on the server to browse into.

Shelves

Shelves are named consistently whatever your server calls them — Recently added, Most played, Continue watching, Latest films, Audiobooks, Playlists and so on. Only shelves with something in them are drawn.

Each heading ends in a chevron that opens the whole list, and where its contents are playable, Play all and Shuffle all sit beside it.

Which shelves, and in what order, is yours. Manage shelves sits under Manage servers in the Show servers sheet: Shelves on Activity lists every one — Drag to change the order. Switch one off to hide it. A shelf a server does not have, or has nothing on, is not drawn either way. The same order is under Media servers in Settings, as The order of the shelves. The shelves that carry on something you started — Continue watching, Continue listening, Continue reading — lead until you move them.

Any of these shelves can be on Home too — see The Home screen.

Shelves load as you scroll to them rather than all at once, which is what keeps a large library from being a long wait. Pull down to refresh past the saved copy.

Inside a folder or a shelf

Tracks draw as a list, films and albums as a grid of covers. A sort control offers As listed, Name, and — where the items carry them — Rating and Year.

As listed is the server's own order, which for a playlist is usually the one you want.

Detail pages

An album, a playlist or an audiobook opens to its cover, a facts line giving its year, how many tracks and how long it runs, Play and Shuffle, and its contents. The word follows the thing: chapters for a book, episodes for a season.

An audiobook lists its chapters, where the server states them — Audiobookshelf does — rather than its files: numbered, named, with where each starts in the whole book, and the one playing marked. Tap one to play the book from there. Beside Play — where an album has Shuffle — a book has Download, which keeps the whole book on the device — the same as Download all in the menu. The player treats it as one book; see Listening to a book.

An artist opens to a portrait, their albums, top tracks, who they appear alongside, similar artists, an Artist mix button and a link to look them up on Wikipedia.

A film or an episode opens to its poster, tagline, overview, genres, director, writers, studios and cast.

A film opens, a track plays

Tapping a track plays it. Tapping a film opens it — because a tap on a poster is asking for the overview, the cast and the running time, not for two hours to start.

Where the server holds no record for a film, there is nothing to open, so it plays instead.

Where you left off

Resume appears in place of Play when pressing it would genuinely carry on.

That position is Mediagg's own record of where you got to, not the server's guess. It means a book you were part-way through before you added the account still resumes correctly, and a server with progress reporting switched off does not lose your place.

Two accounts on the same server are kept apart: a book one of them has begun is not one the other has.