Sort by Filename

[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