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[hvaleton]

(14-05-2013 19:58)sbilotta Wrote:  

(14-05-2013 19:38)hvaleton Wrote:  Hi,

Let me first say that I'm new here and have only been using MinimServer for a few weeks. I very much like most of its features, especially the Intelligent Browsing. I listen to classical music mostly.
One thing that bothers me, though, is that in "folder view", when I have drilled down to the level where the actual music files are, these files are ordered alphabetically based on their Album name tag. I would like to see them ordered based on their file names, which begin with two (or sometimes three) numerical characters, such as 01, 02, 03 etc.
In my collection (as in most collections, I assume) the tracks of one cd are put together in a folder. Let's have take the following folder as an example:
M:\1_KLAS\Mendelssohn\Concert\Vioolconcerten (Ibragimova)

this folder contains 7 flac files:
01 Op.64; 1 Allegro molto appassionato.flac
02 Op.64; 2 Andante.flac
03 Op.64; 3 Allegretto non troppo - Allegro molto vivace.flac
04 Op.26; Allegro moderato - Animato in tempo.flac
05 Vioolconcert in d; 1 Allegro.flac
06 Vioolconcert in d; 2 Adagio -.flac
07 Vioolconcert in d; 3 Allegro molto.flac

Tracks 1-3 share a common album name:
Mendelssohn - Vioolconcert in e, Op.64 (Ibragimova, OAE, Jurowski)

Track 4 has the album name:
Mendelssohn - Ouverture 'De Hebriden' ('Fingal's Cave'), Op.26 (OAE, Jurowski)

Tracks 5-7 share a common album name:
Mendelssohn - Vioolconcert in d (Ibragimova, OAE, Jurowski)

In MinimServer, in folder view, these files are shown as follows:
Op.26: Allegro moderato - Animato in tempo (= track 4)
Vioolconcert in d: 1 Allegro (= track 5)
Vioolconcert in d: 2 Adagio - (= track 6)
Vioolconcert in d: 3 Allegro molto (= track 7)
Op.64: 1 Allegro molto appassionato (= track 1)
Op.64: 2 Andante (= track 2)
Op.64: 3 Allegretto non troppo - Allegro molto vivace (= track 3)

I think it's clear how this is confuses me. I don't want to listen to this cd in the order as given above, but in the original order, with the overture as a entr'acte between both violin concertos.

Now I did read somewhere in an earlier post within this thread that you said it was not possible to sort based on file name, but that case was slightly different, in that it did not concern folder view.
Maybe in folder view it would be possible after all to sort based on file name? Perhaps you could make it a configurable option? Before MinimServer I used Twonky and that never had this problem. I'd hate to have to use both Twonky ans MinimServer, Twonky for folder view in order to listen to entire cd's in the original order, and MinimServer for listening tot very specific albums tracks, using the excellent tag based drill down search options.

I do hope the above example makes sense, if not, let me know.

Thanks in advance,

regards,

Hans Valeton

Hi Hans,
I will obviously let Simon answer your query, but just FYI my query was also based upon folder view, as that is the only way I browse my music collection, even if I did not mention it.
I would be happy if this way of browsing changes Simon's initial response... but I doubt it

All the best.
Stefano

Hi Stefano,
Thanks for your quick response. But if your remark is true, how in heaven's name is one to listen to an entire cd in its original order, ever? I mean, you mentioned some of your music files lacked tags (and so had no album name, based on which they could be ordered) and were not sorted correctly because of that. But all my files have been tagged with great accuracy. So, with the risk of repeating myself, how does one play an entire cd?

Edit:
I have just now tried to add "Track" to indexTags and changed Album.sortTags to:
Album.sortTags={Track, Album, Artist}
But this does not seem to solve my problem.
My thinking was that, since all my music files have track numbers that are unique within a folder, if I could add this tag to the index tags, this could perhaps help me.
Is "Track" the proper tag name for track number anyway?


regards, Hans

[sbilotta]

(14-05-2013 20:15)hvaleton Wrote:  

(14-05-2013 19:58)sbilotta Wrote:  

(14-05-2013 19:38)hvaleton Wrote:  Hi,

Let me first say that I'm new here and have only been using MinimServer for a few weeks. I very much like most of its features, especially the Intelligent Browsing. I listen to classical music mostly.
One thing that bothers me, though, is that in "folder view", when I have drilled down to the level where the actual music files are, these files are ordered alphabetically based on their Album name tag. I would like to see them ordered based on their file names, which begin with two (or sometimes three) numerical characters, such as 01, 02, 03 etc.
In my collection (as in most collections, I assume) the tracks of one cd are put together in a folder. Let's have take the following folder as an example:
M:\1_KLAS\Mendelssohn\Concert\Vioolconcerten (Ibragimova)

this folder contains 7 flac files:
01 Op.64; 1 Allegro molto appassionato.flac
02 Op.64; 2 Andante.flac
03 Op.64; 3 Allegretto non troppo - Allegro molto vivace.flac
04 Op.26; Allegro moderato - Animato in tempo.flac
05 Vioolconcert in d; 1 Allegro.flac
06 Vioolconcert in d; 2 Adagio -.flac
07 Vioolconcert in d; 3 Allegro molto.flac

Tracks 1-3 share a common album name:
Mendelssohn - Vioolconcert in e, Op.64 (Ibragimova, OAE, Jurowski)

Track 4 has the album name:
Mendelssohn - Ouverture 'De Hebriden' ('Fingal's Cave'), Op.26 (OAE, Jurowski)

Tracks 5-7 share a common album name:
Mendelssohn - Vioolconcert in d (Ibragimova, OAE, Jurowski)

In MinimServer, in folder view, these files are shown as follows:
Op.26: Allegro moderato - Animato in tempo (= track 4)
Vioolconcert in d: 1 Allegro (= track 5)
Vioolconcert in d: 2 Adagio - (= track 6)
Vioolconcert in d: 3 Allegro molto (= track 7)
Op.64: 1 Allegro molto appassionato (= track 1)
Op.64: 2 Andante (= track 2)
Op.64: 3 Allegretto non troppo - Allegro molto vivace (= track 3)

I think it's clear how this is confuses me. I don't want to listen to this cd in the order as given above, but in the original order, with the overture as a entr'acte between both violin concertos.

Now I did read somewhere in an earlier post within this thread that you said it was not possible to sort based on file name, but that case was slightly different, in that it did not concern folder view.
Maybe in folder view it would be possible after all to sort based on file name? Perhaps you could make it a configurable option? Before MinimServer I used Twonky and that never had this problem. I'd hate to have to use both Twonky ans MinimServer, Twonky for folder view in order to listen to entire cd's in the original order, and MinimServer for listening tot very specific albums tracks, using the excellent tag based drill down search options.

I do hope the above example makes sense, if not, let me know.

Thanks in advance,

regards,

Hans Valeton

Hi Hans,
I will obviously let Simon answer your query, but just FYI my query was also based upon folder view, as that is the only way I browse my music collection, even if I did not mention it.
I would be happy if this way of browsing changes Simon's initial response... but I doubt it

All the best.
Stefano

Hi Stefano,
Thanks for your quick response. But if your remark is true, how in heaven's name is one to listen to an entire cd in its original order, ever? I mean, you mentioned some of your music files lacked tags (and so had no album name, based on which they could be ordered) and were not sorted correctly because of that. But all my files have been tagged with great accuracy. So, with the risk of repeating myself, how does one play an entire cd?

Edit:
I have just now tried to add "Track" to indexTags and changed Album.sortTags to:
Album.sortTags={Track, Album, Artist}
But this does not seem to solve my problem.
My thinking was that, since all my music files have track numbers that are unique within a folder, if I could add this tag to the index tags, this could perhaps help me.
Is "Track" the proper tag name for track number anyway?


regards, Hans

Hi Hans,
sorry, I did not read well your post and thought you had my same issue i.e. tags not always populated.
Do you have TRACKNUMBER in the indexTags field ? or maybe you could try to put TRACKNUMBER in the Album.sortTags, instead of Track, and maybe take out the Album field as that is apparently "sorting" your songs.
Just a few thoughts.

Regards
Stefano

[simoncn]

(14-05-2013 20:15)hvaleton Wrote:  Hi Stefano,
Thanks for your quick response. But if your remark is true, how in heaven's name is one to listen to an entire cd in its original order, ever? I mean, you mentioned some of your music files lacked tags (and so had no album name, based on which they could be ordered) and were not sorted correctly because of that. But all my files have been tagged with great accuracy. So, with the risk of repeating myself, how does one play an entire cd?

The Album tag is intended to represent the entire CD. If a folder contains an entire CD (Album tag), the current MinimServer sort order will do what you want. If the folder contains multiple entire CDs (Album tags), the current sort order will group the tracks of each album (entire CD) together.

I have the impression you're not using the Album tag to represent the entire CD, but to represent a musical work within the CD. MinimServer supports the Group tag for tagging musical works within an album, and you would get the correct sort order if you tag each musical work as a Group instead of an Album.

Quote:Edit:
I have just now tried to add "Track" to indexTags and changed Album.sortTags to:
Album.sortTags={Track, Album, Artist}
But this does not seem to solve my problem.
My thinking was that, since all my music files have track numbers that are unique within a folder, if I could add this tag to the index tags, this could perhaps help me.
Is "Track" the proper tag name for track number anyway?

regards, Hans

You would need to use Tracknumber, not Track. However, this won't work at present because Tracknumber values are currently ignored for indexTags and itemTags processing. I will enable this in the next release so you can try it, but you might not be happy with the strange sort order it produces for the "n albums" list. Using the Group tag for musical works is a better approach.

[simoncn]

(14-05-2013 19:58)sbilotta Wrote:  Hi Hans,
I will obviously let Simon answer your query, but just FYI my query was also based upon folder view, as that is the only way I browse my music collection, even if I did not mention it.
I would be happy if this way of browsing changes Simon's initial response... but I doubt it

All the best.
Stefano

The use case that was described initially would be handled correctly by MinimServer if the files have TRACKNUMBER tags. It should be possible to add these tags automatically using Mp3tag. Given this, I don't think it's necessary to add a new option to MinimServer to provide an alternative way of handling this use case. For other use cases, the situation might be different.

[hvaleton]

(14-05-2013 22:14)simoncn Wrote:  The Album tag is intended to represent the entire CD. If a folder contains an entire CD (Album tag), the current MinimServer sort order will do what you want. If the folder contains multiple entire CDs (Album tags), the current sort order will group the tracks of each album (entire CD) together.

I have the impression you're not using the Album tag to represent the entire CD, but to represent a musical work within the CD. MinimServer supports the Group tag for tagging musical works within an album, and you would get the correct sort order if you tag each musical work as a Group instead of an Album.

Hi Simon,

Yes, I read that you use a Composition tag to group tracks into one composition, wheras I group the movements of a symphony in an album. I also put a shortened list of the performers and sometimes also the year of recording in the Album tag to be able to see the difference between various performances of the same symphony.
I also (redundantly) put the name of the composer in the Album tag, because otherwise the name of the composer would get lost in the presentation of track info in alle access points I have used so far. For serious listening I have a Linn DS Akurate (using Kinsky or Chorus on my iPad) and for less serious listening in the remainder of the house I have three Sonos zones. Sonos soes not, and probably never will show the Composer tag.
Your method seems to have some advantages but I'll have to give this a lot of thought before I re-tag my entire collection of some 9000 cd's.
What do you put in the Composition tag? Just, say, "Symphony No.2 in E flat major"? In that case it could sometimes probably be used for more than one composer, so that one would absolutely need the composer tag to get a unique combination And what about the performers?
Very importantly: will this Compsoition tag be shown in any access point app in the "now playing" section? I personally doubt it. And that would make the Composition tag only usable in the search process, correct?
Please enlighten me!

Thanks in advance,
Hans

[simoncn]

(15-05-2013 11:02)hvaleton Wrote:  Hi Simon,

Yes, I read that you use a Composition tag to group tracks into one composition, wheras I group the movements of a symphony in an album.

It's much more important to populate the Group tag than the Composition tag. I'll take a look at the documentation to see if this needs clarifying.

If you populate the Group tag, MinimServer will send "album" XML data to the control point that's equivalent to what you're getting at the moment. This should mean you'll continue to see the same thing in Kinsky, Chorus or Sonos. (I don't have any Sonos equipment, so I haven't been able to try this with Sonos.)

The advantage of doing this is that you can easily find, select and play an entire album (CD) in its original order. You can also easily find, select and play any multi-movement musical work within the album.

The Compostion tag is optional, and I'd suggest you start without this and maybe add it later if you need the additional indexing that it provides.

Quote: I also put a shortened list of the performers and sometimes also the year of recording in the Album tag to be able to see the difference between various performances of the same symphony.
I also (redundantly) put the name of the composer in the Album tag, because otherwise the name of the composer would get lost in the presentation of track info in alle access points I have used so far.

You can do all this with the Group tag. Alternatively, you can use the tagFormat property to include this additional information in the "album" XML data that MinimServer sends to the control point. This is an alternative to manually copying this information into the Album or Group tag.

Quote: For serious listening I have a Linn DS Akurate (using Kinsky or Chorus on my iPad) and for less serious listening in the remainder of the house I have three Sonos zones. Sonos soes not, and probably never will show the Composer tag.
Your method seems to have some advantages but I'll have to give this a lot of thought before I re-tag my entire collection of some 9000 cd's.
What do you put in the Composition tag? Just, say, "Symphony No.2 in E flat major"? In that case it could sometimes probably be used for more than one composer, so that one would absolutely need the composer tag to get a unique combination And what about the performers?

This comes down to your personal preference. If you're browsing by index, it isn't necessary to add composer or performer information to the Group or Composition tag, because you can use the Composer or Performer/Artist indexes in combination with the Group or Composition index to resolve any ambiguity in the Composition or Group value. If you're browsing a flat list of Groups or Compositions, you might find it useful to have some additional information for disambiguation.

Quote:Very importantly: will this Compsoition tag be shown in any access point app in the "now playing" section? I personally doubt it. And that would make the Composition tag only usable in the search process, correct?
Please enlighten me!

Thanks in advance,
Hans

An advantage of using the Group tag for your musical works is that you'll see the Group value in the "Now Playing" section automatically. You can also use the displayFormat setting in the tagFormat property to customize the Now Playing section with any tags in your files.

[hvaleton]

Hello Simon,

Thanks for all your answers and the time you put into this. You've given me a lot to think about and I've been experimenting into the wee small hours, yesterday.

(15-05-2013 12:31)simoncn Wrote:  

(15-05-2013 11:02)hvaleton Wrote:  Hi Simon,

Yes, I read that you use a Composition tag to group tracks into one composition, wheras I group the movements of a symphony in an album.

It's much more important to populate the Group tag than the Composition tag. I'll take a look at the documentation to see if this needs clarifying.

If you populate the Group tag, MinimServer will send "album" XML data to the control point that's equivalent to what you're getting at the moment. This should mean you'll continue to see the same thing in Kinsky, Chorus or Sonos. (I don't have any Sonos equipment, so I haven't been able to try this with Sonos.)

The advantage of doing this is that you can easily find, select and play an entire album (CD) in its original order. You can also easily find, select and play any multi-movement musical work within the album.

The Compostion tag is optional, and I'd suggest you start without this and maybe add it later if you need the additional indexing that it provides.

I did start with the Group tag as you suggested. Normally I do all my tagging using MediaMonkey, but MM does not ssem to support the creation or edtiting of custom tags, other than "Custom 1", "Custom 2", etc. Maybe I'm overlooking something but I can't get MM to change these into "Group", or "Composition", etc. (Suggestions for MM, anyone?)
Then I tried Mp3tag (rather unfamiliar to me, but I'm learning to use it now) and with this tool I succeeded in creating the Group tag in a number of test files. In it I put the same info I normally put in 'Album', and I changed 'Album' for all files within the same folder/directory to the name of its directory.
So, Album = Vioolconcerten (Ibragimova), and
tracks 1-3: Group = Mendelssohn - Vioolconcert in e, Op.64 (Ibragimova, OAE, Jurowski)
track 4: Group = Mendelssohn - Ouverture 'De Hebriden' ('Fingal's Cave'), Op.26 (OAE, Jurowski)
Tracks 5-7: Group = Mendelssohn - Vioolconcert in d (Ibragimova, OAE, Jurowski)
This worked fine, as you predicted.
In Sonos, however, Album is a very important source of information, since the on screen info is scarce and there's little room it, so you need to wait for the various fields to start scrolling one after the other... A real nightmare, actually. Sonos has definitely not been designed for classical music! But I'm digressing here.

After making the aforementioned changes to my test files, showed:
Title: Op.64: 1 Allegro molto appassionato
Artists: Alina Ibragimova (viool), Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, Vladimir Jurowski
Album: Mendelssohn - Vioolconcerten (Ibragimova)

As you can see some information is lacking here. I can guess from the prefix of the title, "Op.64: " that Mendelssohns famous violin concerto in E minor is being played, but in other cases this would not be so easy. There are many cases in which the composer of the track that's being played is not in the Album tag. There is no Composer field in any of the Sonos access points (Sonos CR-100 controller, Sonos Ipad app, Sonos Android app, Sonos for Windows).
Take for instance the fourth track in my example: it's an overture and (so) is not named in the Album tag.
All in all, I think it's clear why I would try and hold on to my original way of Album tagging, for the sake of Sonos.

Then a brilliant idea came up
What if I put the Folder/Directory name in a new custom tag named AlbumMinim and put "AlbumMinim:Album" in the aliasTags setting?
This way I would not have to change the text of my Album tags and MinimServer would treat AlbumMinim as Album to get the correct order of tracks in Folder View.
I tried this but it did not work out, unfortunately. The track order was still the same as when I started:

Mendelssohn - Ouverture 'De Hebriden' ('Fingal's Cave'), Op.26 (OAE, Jurowski)
Mendelssohn - Vioolconcert in d (Ibragimova, OAE, Jurowski)
Mendelssohn - Vioolconcert in e, Op.64 (Ibragimova, OAE, Jurowski)

(N.B. I've given the Group titles here, since the grouping still works.)

In my desperation I've also added both AlbumMinim and Album to the list of indexTags, but this did not change the sorting behaviour.
Is there someting I don't understand about the alias function? Or is Album treated differently from all the other tags?
I have succesfully tried aliasing Composer to Componist.

Quote:

Quote: I also put a shortened list of the performers and sometimes also the year of recording in the Album tag to be able to see the difference between various performances of the same symphony.
I also (redundantly) put the name of the composer in the Album tag, because otherwise the name of the composer would get lost in the presentation of track info in alle access points I have used so far.

You can do all this with the Group tag. Alternatively, you can use the tagFormat property to include this additional information in the "album" XML data that MinimServer sends to the control point. This is an alternative to manually copying this information into the Album or Group tag.

Quote: For serious listening I have a Linn DS Akurate (using Kinsky or Chorus on my iPad) and for less serious listening in the remainder of the house I have three Sonos zones. Sonos soes not, and probably never will show the Composer tag.
Your method seems to have some advantages but I'll have to give this a lot of thought before I re-tag my entire collection of some 9000 cd's.
What do you put in the Composition tag? Just, say, "Symphony No.2 in E flat major"? In that case it could sometimes probably be used for more than one composer, so that one would absolutely need the composer tag to get a unique combination And what about the performers?

This comes down to your personal preference. If you're browsing by index, it isn't necessary to add composer or performer information to the Group or Composition tag, because you can use the Composer or Performer/Artist indexes in combination with the Group or Composition index to resolve any ambiguity in the Composition or Group value. If you're browsing a flat list of Groups or Compositions, you might find it useful to have some additional information for disambiguation.

I've added and populated Composition tags to my test files and it works like a charm. I will of course keep experimenting but this is a promising addition. Thanks!

Quote:

Quote:Very importantly: will this Composition tag be shown in any access point app in the "now playing" section? I personally doubt it. And that would make the Composition tag only usable in the search process, correct?
Please enlighten me!

Thanks in advance,
Hans

An advantage of using the Group tag for your musical works is that you'll see the Group value in the "Now Playing" section automatically. You can also use the displayFormat setting in the tagFormat property to customize the Now Playing section with any tags in your files.

[simoncn]

(16-05-2013 15:38)hvaleton Wrote:  Hello Simon,

Thanks for all your answers and the time you put into this. You've given me a lot to think about and I've been experimenting into the wee small hours, yesterday.

I did start with the Group tag as you suggested. Normally I do all my tagging using MediaMonkey, but MM does not ssem to support the creation or edtiting of custom tags, other than "Custom 1", "Custom 2", etc. Maybe I'm overlooking something but I can't get MM to change these into "Group", or "Composition", etc. (Suggestions for MM, anyone?)

As a workaround, you could use aliasTags in MinimServer to make this change.

Quote:Then I tried Mp3tag (rather unfamiliar to me, but I'm learning to use it now) and with this tool I succeeded in creating the Group tag in a number of test files. In it I put the same info I normally put in 'Album', and I changed 'Album' for all files within the same folder/directory to the name of its directory.
So, Album = Vioolconcerten (Ibragimova), and
tracks 1-3: Group = Mendelssohn - Vioolconcert in e, Op.64 (Ibragimova, OAE, Jurowski)
track 4: Group = Mendelssohn - Ouverture 'De Hebriden' ('Fingal's Cave'), Op.26 (OAE, Jurowski)
Tracks 5-7: Group = Mendelssohn - Vioolconcert in d (Ibragimova, OAE, Jurowski)
This worked fine, as you predicted.
In Sonos, however, Album is a very important source of information, since the on screen info is scarce and there's little room it, so you need to wait for the various fields to start scrolling one after the other... A real nightmare, actually. Sonos has definitely not been designed for classical music! But I'm digressing here.

After making the aforementioned changes to my test files, showed:
Title: Op.64: 1 Allegro molto appassionato
Artists: Alina Ibragimova (viool), Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, Vladimir Jurowski
Album: Mendelssohn - Vioolconcerten (Ibragimova)

Is this what you are seeing on the Sonos Now Playing display? This isn't what I would expect. Are you using MinimServer 0.72? This should be sending the following information to the control point:

Title: Op.64: 1 Allegro molto appassionato
Artists: Alina Ibragimova (viool), Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, Vladimir Jurowski
Album: Mendelssohn - Vioolconcert in e, Op.64 (Ibragimova, OAE, Jurowski)

Because the track is part of a group, the Album information for the track is taken from the Group tag, not the Album tag. This is a change from the 0.71 release onwards.

It's possible that the Sonos is overriding this track information sent by MinimServer and using Album information that was sent to the control point in previous browsing steps. To confirm whether this is happening, please try playing the same track using a different control point such as Kinsky and let me know what it shows on the Now Playing screen.

Quote:As you can see some information is lacking here. I can guess from the prefix of the title, "Op.64: " that Mendelssohns famous violin concerto in E minor is being played, but in other cases this would not be so easy. There are many cases in which the composer of the track that's being played is not in the Album tag. There is no Composer field in any of the Sonos access points (Sonos CR-100 controller, Sonos Ipad app, Sonos Android app, Sonos for Windows).
Take for instance the fourth track in my example: it's an overture and (so) is not named in the Album tag.
All in all, I think it's clear why I would try and hold on to my original way of Album tagging, for the sake of Sonos.

Yes, I understand why you need this "composition" information to be included by the Sonos as part of the Album information.

Quote:Then a brilliant idea came up
What if I put the Folder/Directory name in a new custom tag named AlbumMinim and put "AlbumMinim:Album" in the aliasTags setting?
This way I would not have to change the text of my Album tags and MinimServer would treat AlbumMinim as Album to get the correct order of tracks in Folder View.
I tried this but it did not work out, unfortunately. The track order was still the same as when I started:

Mendelssohn - Ouverture 'De Hebriden' ('Fingal's Cave'), Op.26 (OAE, Jurowski)
Mendelssohn - Vioolconcert in d (Ibragimova, OAE, Jurowski)
Mendelssohn - Vioolconcert in e, Op.64 (Ibragimova, OAE, Jurowski)

(N.B. I've given the Group titles here, since the grouping still works.)

In my desperation I've also added both AlbumMinim and Album to the list of indexTags, but this did not change the sorting behaviour.
Is there someting I don't understand about the alias function? Or is Album treated differently from all the other tags?
I have succesfully tried aliasing Composer to Componist.

The problem you're seeing is caused by having two Album tag values for each track: the original Album value and the AlbumMinim value. In this case, MinimServer will ignore the second conflicting value (from AlbumMinim:Album) and will write a warning message to the log. It's always worth checking the log to see if there are any error or warning messages.

You would need to add another alias Album:nil to get what you're expecting. However, this would presumably take you back to the previous situation with the AlbumMinim tag value being shown by the Sonos as the album value.

[hvaleton]

(16-05-2013 16:53)simoncn Wrote:  

(16-05-2013 15:38)hvaleton Wrote:  Hello Simon,

Thanks for all your answers and the time you put into this. You've given me a lot to think about and I've been experimenting into the wee small hours, yesterday.

I did start with the Group tag as you suggested. Normally I do all my tagging using MediaMonkey, but MM does not ssem to support the creation or edtiting of custom tags, other than "Custom 1", "Custom 2", etc. Maybe I'm overlooking something but I can't get MM to change these into "Group", or "Composition", etc. (Suggestions for MM, anyone?)

As a workaround, you could use aliasTags in MinimServer to make this change.

That might be a nice workaround, I'll try that later on and keep you posted.

Quote:

Quote:Then I tried Mp3tag (rather unfamiliar to me, but I'm learning to use it now) and with this tool I succeeded in creating the Group tag in a number of test files. In it I put the same info I normally put in 'Album', and I changed 'Album' for all files within the same folder/directory to the name of its directory.
So, Album = Vioolconcerten (Ibragimova), and
tracks 1-3: Group = Mendelssohn - Vioolconcert in e, Op.64 (Ibragimova, OAE, Jurowski)
track 4: Group = Mendelssohn - Ouverture 'De Hebriden' ('Fingal's Cave'), Op.26 (OAE, Jurowski)
Tracks 5-7: Group = Mendelssohn - Vioolconcert in d (Ibragimova, OAE, Jurowski)
This worked fine, as you predicted.
In Sonos, however, Album is a very important source of information, since the on screen info is scarce and there's little room in it, so you need to wait for the various fields to start scrolling one after the other... A real nightmare, actually. Sonos has definitely not been designed for classical music! But I'm digressing here.

After making the aforementioned changes to my test files, showed:
Title: Op.64: 1 Allegro molto appassionato
Artists: Alina Ibragimova (viool), Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, Vladimir Jurowski
Album: Mendelssohn - Vioolconcerten (Ibragimova)

Is this what you are seeing on the Sonos Now Playing display? This isn't what I would expect. Are you using MinimServer 0.72? This should be sending the following information to the control point:

Title: Op.64: 1 Allegro molto appassionato
Artists: Alina Ibragimova (viool), Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, Vladimir Jurowski
Album: Mendelssohn - Vioolconcert in e, Op.64 (Ibragimova, OAE, Jurowski)

Because the track is part of a group, the Album information for the track is taken from the Group tag, not the Album tag. This is a change from the 0.71 release onwards.

It's possible that the Sonos is overriding this track information sent by MinimServer and using Album information that was sent to the control point in previous browsing steps. To confirm whether this is happening, please try playing the same track using a different control point such as Kinsky and let me know what it shows on the Now Playing screen.

I see I have some additional explaining to do on the subject of Sonos and its workings. I'm sorry I did not do that earlier. I could have saved you some confusion.

You see, Sonos is a completely self contained system. It does not even use a third party music server (such as your MinimServer) but it does everything itself, hence its popularity among those music lovers who want a music player that is simple, robust and that is pleasantly predictable in its behaviour. It has its own music server (mirrored in every zone) that it builds based upon the tag infomation it reads from the files on your NAS.

There's an added complexity in that I use .m3u playlists for my classical music as regards Sonos. I've allowed my Sonos to create its music database for my popular music (some 800 cd's) and therefore has direct access to these pop flac files (via a symlink). But if I were to "feed" my Sonos with all my classical files it would transgress its (very stupid) 65k limt. Sonos completely stops reading files after about the 65000th. That may sound a lot, but at this moment I already have more than 107,000 classical files and this number will probably keep growing. My popular files amount to no more than 12,000, so no problem there.
So that is why I have not given Sonos direct access to my classical music files. Instead Sonos has access to a share containing a directory tree emulating the tree in which the actual classical music files reside, containing an .m3u file for each cd or cd set. Sonos counts each .m3u playlist as one item so it reaches its limit about ten times later (assuming there's ten tracks per cd on average). The downside of this rather awkward workaround is that I can't use the Sonos search function for my classical music, but that's a small price to pay. As long as the girls can use the search function on the Sonos to find such evergreens as "Yellow Submarine" in the pop collection, and I am quoting reality here as it unfolds at this very moment!

As I already said somewehere else in this thread, I only use the Linn for serious, classical listening, and then of course there are no such silly upper limits. I assume that MinimServer will not suddenly crash at 200,000 files? I would be VERY surprised if it did. From what I found out while doing my recent tests, MinimServer is a very smooth and fast tool. Congratulations on that!
Back to Sonos (I know, I know, I'm still digressing but I'd like to finish my story): Sonos reads the .m3u files and (naturally) only gets the location of each file from it. But because of the emulated directory tree I can reasonably easy find the playlist and hence the cd that I'm looking for in Sonos's version of Folder View.
The .m3u file for my test cd, e.g., is found here:
N:\1_KLAS\Mendelssohn\Concert\Vioolconcerten (Ibragimova).m3u
and looks like:
\\192.168.1.44\multimedia\music\1_KLAS\Mendelssohn\Concert\Vioolconcerten (Ibragimova)\01 Op.64; 1 Allegro molto appassionato.flac
\\192.168.1.44\multimedia\music\1_KLAS\Mendelssohn\Concert\Vioolconcerten (Ibragimova)\02 Op.64; 2 Andante.flac
\\192.168.1.44\multimedia\music\1_KLAS\Mendelssohn\Concert\Vioolconcerten (Ibragimova)\03 Op.64; 3 Allegretto non troppo - Allegro molto vivace.flac
\\192.168.1.44\multimedia\music\1_KLAS\Mendelssohn\Concert\Vioolconcerten (Ibragimova)\04 Op.26; Allegro moderato - Animato in tempo.flac
\\192.168.1.44\multimedia\music\1_KLAS\Mendelssohn\Concert\Vioolconcerten (Ibragimova)\05 Vioolconcert in d; 1 Allegro.flac
\\192.168.1.44\multimedia\music\1_KLAS\Mendelssohn\Concert\Vioolconcerten (Ibragimova)\06 Vioolconcert in d; 2 Adagio -.flac
\\192.168.1.44\multimedia\music\1_KLAS\Mendelssohn\Concert\Vioolconcerten (Ibragimova)\07 Vioolconcert in d; 3 Allegro molto.flac

(BTW: I use a VB script in MM to automatically generate these .m3u files)

Sonos uses these file locations to be able to find and play the correct music file and reads its tags only at playing time.
So, to cut a long story short (), that is why Sonos only 'sees' the Album tag as is, and not some aliased tag that I would perhaps want it to read! Oh, if only the Sonos could be told to read from a music server such as MinimServer. Then life would be very much easier! But also more complex, in a way...

Oh, and by the way, to answer your question: Only yesterday I upgraded both MinimServer and MinimWatch from 0.71 to 0.72.

Quote:

Quote:As you can see some information is lacking here. I can guess from the prefix of the title, "Op.64: " that Mendelssohns famous violin concerto in E minor is being played, but in other cases this would not be so easy. There are many cases in which the composer of the track that's being played is not in the Album tag. There is no Composer field in any of the Sonos access points (Sonos CR-100 controller, Sonos Ipad app, Sonos Android app, Sonos for Windows).
Take for instance the fourth track in my example: it's an overture and (so) is not named in the Album tag.
All in all, I think it's clear why I would try and hold on to my original way of Album tagging, for the sake of Sonos.

Yes, I understand why you need this "composition" information to be included by the Sonos as part of the Album information.

Quote:Then a brilliant idea came up :
What if I put the Folder/Directory name in a new custom tag named AlbumMinim and put "AlbumMinim:Album" in the aliasTags setting?
This way I would not have to change the text of my Album tags and MinimServer would treat AlbumMinim as Album to get the correct order of tracks in Folder View.
I tried this but it did not work out, unfortunately. The track order was still the same as when I started:

Mendelssohn - Ouverture 'De Hebriden' ('Fingal's Cave'), Op.26 (OAE, Jurowski)
Mendelssohn - Vioolconcert in d (Ibragimova, OAE, Jurowski)
Mendelssohn - Vioolconcert in e, Op.64 (Ibragimova, OAE, Jurowski)

(N.B. I've given the Group titles here, since the grouping still works.)

In my desperation I've also added both AlbumMinim and Album to the list of indexTags, but this did not change the sorting behaviour.
Is there someting I don't understand about the alias function? Or is Album treated differently from all the other tags?
I have succesfully tried aliasing Composer to Componist. (Yes, I'm Dutch...)

The problem you're seeing is caused by having two Album tag values for each track: the original Album value and the AlbumMinim value. In this case, MinimServer will ignore the second conflicting value (from AlbumMinim:Album) and will write a warning message to the log. It's always worth checking the log to see if there are any error or warning messages.

You are so right! I should have looked at the logs. They are very informative (good programming!).
Here they are:

Warning: conflicting ALBUM tag value Mendelssohn - Vioolconcert (Vengerov, Gewandhausorchester Leipzig, Masur) ignored for file Vioolconcert (Vengerov, Gewandhausorchester Leipzig, Masur)/04 Op.64; 1 Allegro molto appassionato.flac
Warning: conflicting ALBUM tag value Mendelssohn - Vioolconcert (Vengerov, Gewandhausorchester Leipzig, Masur) ignored for file Vioolconcert (Vengerov, Gewandhausorchester Leipzig, Masur)/05 Op.64; 2 Andante.flac
Warning: conflicting ALBUM tag value Mendelssohn - Vioolconcert (Vengerov, Gewandhausorchester Leipzig, Masur) ignored for file Vioolconcert (Vengerov, Gewandhausorchester Leipzig, Masur)/06 Op.64; 3 Allegretto non troppo - Allegro molto vivace.flac
Warning: conflicting ALBUM tag value Mendelssohn - Vioolconcerten (Ibragimova) ignored for file Vioolconcerten (Ibragimova)/02 Op.64; 2 Andante.flac
Warning: conflicting ALBUM tag value Mendelssohn - Vioolconcerten (Ibragimova) ignored for file Vioolconcerten (Ibragimova)/06 Vioolconcert in d; 2 Adagio -.flac
Warning: conflicting ALBUM tag value Mendelssohn - Vioolconcerten (Ibragimova) ignored for file Vioolconcerten (Ibragimova)/01 Op.64; 1 Allegro molto appassionato.flac
Warning: conflicting ALBUM tag value Mendelssohn - Vioolconcerten (Ibragimova) ignored for file Vioolconcerten (Ibragimova)/03 Op.64; 3 Allegretto non troppo - Allegro molto vivace.flac
Warning: conflicting ALBUM tag value Mendelssohn - Vioolconcerten (Ibragimova) ignored for file Vioolconcerten (Ibragimova)/05 Vioolconcert in d; 1 Allegro.flac
Warning: conflicting ALBUM tag value Mendelssohn - Vioolconcerten (Ibragimova) ignored for file Vioolconcerten (Ibragimova)/07 Vioolconcert in d; 3 Allegro molto.flac
Warning: conflicting ALBUM tag value Mendelssohn - Vioolconcerten (Ibragimova) ignored for file Vioolconcerten (Ibragimova)/04 Op.26; Allegro moderato - Animato in tempo.flac

Quote:You would need to add another alias Album:nil to get what you're expecting. However, this would presumably take you back to the previous situation with the AlbumMinim tag value being shown by the Sonos as the album value.

You have just made my day!
It just took the alias Album:nil to make it all work out as I wanted it to. Great! Thanks ever so much!
And the problem you suggested might arise for Sonos is simply neither here nor there because of ... (see my explanation/novella on Sonos above)

I will now go and open a bottle of wine and continue my tests.

And did I already mention how much I like the grouping functionality? I do. A lot!
Thanks!

Regards, Hans

[Oliviander]

hi
I just read along the thread, as I recognized some of my own experiences.

As everything worked out I have nothing more to say than that
the

Tag:nil
alias necessity

to supress the original tag
should really be mentioned in the manual.

It took my some hours to figure this out a few weeks ago.
And though it is quite logical if you got it,
and therefore should be kept that way,
it is not that obvious in the first place.

But great that everything worked out,
I for myself am now really happy with MinS