Customising viewing by genre

[GrumpyPatzer]

Hello everyone

I’m new here, having just activated a trial license. I must say, based on having looked at it for just a couple of minutes, I’m already most impressed by MinimServer!

For well over a decade, I have used a *very* old version of Twonky, with a customised version of the view XML files that causes it to present my music collection (mostly classical) in the way I want, which is mainly to use a combination of genre and composer. I have spent (far too …) much time over the years making sure that the tags are how I want them. I believe that the new versions of Twonky does not allow the view to be customised in this way so, for that reason and also because I suspect my (very) old QNAP NAS will, in the not too distant future, call it a day, I thought it worth looking at alternatives.

As I say, my first impression of MinimServer is extremely positive. I can obviously use it on my NAS for now, but may switch to a Pi + SSD in due course. So I have two initial questions.

Firstly, I have noticed a slight difficulty with the way genres are listed in the control point I am using (Kazoo on an iPad). The way I have Twonky configured, if I view by genre, it will simply list the 30 or so genres I use. The thing is that I have quite a few albums tagged with two (or, occasionally, more) genres, separated by a comma, such as “Choral works” and “Live events. So with MinimServer, it seems to list each genre — or combination of genres — separately, whereas I would ideally like it simply to list each of the individual genres and to then show all albums that are tagged with a particular genres, irrespective of whether or not they have a second (or third) genre tag, too.

Does that make sense? Is there any way to achieve this (i.e. to not list combinations of genre when viewing by genre)? I suppose a comma may be a poor choice of separator, but I’d hate to have to change all such instances by hand (just over 300 albums, I think) ….

Secondly (a more minor point), if I select ‘Genre’ from the top-level view, and then select, say, “Symphonies”, is there any way to limit the options that are then presented to, say, <n> albums, composer and date?

Thanks ….
Andrew

[simoncn]

Thank you for your kind words about MinimServer. See below for answers to your questions.

(21-11-2023 13:01)GrumpyPatzer Wrote:  Does that make sense? Is there any way to achieve this (i.e. to not list combinations of genre when viewing by genre)? I suppose a comma may be a poor choice of separator, but I’d hate to have to change all such instances by hand (just over 300 albums, I think) ….

MinimServer can do exactly this if you have tagged the genres as multiple Genre tags instead of as a single combined string. Each tagging program decides how to support tagging in this way. For example, Mp3tag uses the separator \\ for this purpose. Many tagging programs support bulk retagging to handle such cases, so you should not need to edit each tag manually. The same principle also applies to other tags such as Artist.

Quote:Secondly (a more minor point), if I select ‘Genre’ from the top-level view, and then select, say, “Symphonies”, is there any way to limit the options that are then presented to, say, <n> albums, composer and date?

It is not possible to do this with MinimServer. MinimServer provides all available tag selection choices at all stages. You can define the order in which tag choices are presented so that those tags you find more useful are shown at the start of the list.

[GrumpyPatzer]

(21-11-2023 17:58)simoncn Wrote:  

(21-11-2023 13:01)GrumpyPatzer Wrote:  Does that make sense? Is there any way to achieve this (i.e. to not list combinations of genre when viewing by genre)? I suppose a comma may be a poor choice of separator, but I’d hate to have to change all such instances by hand (just over 300 albums, I think) ….

MinimServer can do exactly this if you have tagged the genres as multiple Genre tags instead of as a single combined string. Each tagging program decides how to support tagging in this way. For example, Mp3tag uses the separator \ for this purpose. Many tagging programs support bulk retagging to handle such cases, so you should not need to edit each tag manually. The same principle also applies to other tags such as Artist.

Thanks, Simon. That’s very helpful. Good of you to reply so quickly.

I rather thought that the way Twonky uses a comma as a separator must be, shall we say, a little eccentric. My mistake for making use of that behaviour in the first place. It seems that Tag Editor Lite, which I use on a Mac, recognises \\ as a separator (a bit like looking at JCL in a mirror ….), so it’s not too onerous to do some large scale find&replaces (I think I’ve only got around 300 albums that are tagged in this way).

Having tried it out on a new (but possibly failing) QNAP NAS, I’m definitely now going to buy a license for MinimServer. The old QNAP NAS that I use most days to stream music, using the old version of Twonky, is over ten years old and I see that it is no longer possible to upgrade the operating system. Would MinimServer v2.2 work on QTS v4.2.6?

Ultimately, though, I suppose it’s time to look for an alternative solution, possibly a Raspberry Pi with an SSD. Although, having said that, we’re about to upgrade our fibre service, so I might force myself to be a bit more adventurous and move my music collection to cloud storage …. . That should be fine if I can access the cloud storage from a Pi without it being too much of a palaver.

Thanks again …. Andrew

[simoncn]

MinimServer supports QNAP QTS 4.2.6 as well as some older versions of QTS. You will need to install MinimServer 2.2 using a manual download, as QNAP does not keep the App Center up to date on older QTS versions such as 4.2.6.

I have not tried running MinimServer using files in the cloud. To scan your library, the files need to be directly accessible in the file system of the device running MinimServer. This isn't a problem for a library on another device on your local network (although scanning will take a bit longer). I am not sure whether cloud storage can be mounted on a file system in this way.