MinimServer Forum

Hello

I used the Twonky multi-genre feature which involved using commas to separate the various entries; an example of this bespoke Twonky system is shown below:

Jazz - Contemporary,Jazz,ECM,Chilled

This would mean it appears under the below genres in Twonky

Chilled
ECM
Jazz
Jazz - Contemporary

Of course, the snag is that it appears as one big line in everything else (MinimServer, SlimServer, Sonos, etc).

I have just moved over to MinimServer and have converted my genres to the standard scheme of using multiple comments as shown below:

genre=Chilled
genre=ECM
genre=Jazz
genre=Jazz - Contemporary

This is very easy to do, but I thought it might be useful to show how I did it in case anyone else has to do the same thing. I'd strongly recommend you copy a couple of albums to your PC and use them as sacrificial test albums, so if you get the setting wrong, you can simply delete them!

Section one shows how to add the required functionality to MP3TAG (they call it an 'Action') and then how to test it works. Section 2 shows how to then run it on your live collection. As you can see from section 2, once you have set it all up, running it is really simple (and pretty fast; the whole process took me about 30 minutes for 30,000 FLAC files).

1 - How to set it all up for the first time

First step is to obtain MP3TAG (shareware).

Now access your test music directory, right click it and select to open in MP3TAG.

Click on any of the tracks then use Ctrl+A to select them all.

Now click on the 'Actions' option at the top of MP3TAG and select the 'Actions' option; see below image:



Now click on the 'New' button (top right one with yellow star on it) and in the below popup screen, enter a name for your new 'action group' as shown below (you can call it anything you wish):



From the drop down list of actions, select the one to 'Split field by separator' as shown below:



In the popup options, click on the list arrow and then select the genre field from the menu. In the 'Separator' section, type in a comma (no spaces either side of it; just a comma) as shown below:



After hitting the OK button, it will show you the action you have just created and it should look like the one shown below:



After hitting the OK button, you'll be taken back to the original actions list and your new action will be shown. Ensure it has been ticked (and that no other are ticked) and then click on the OK button; see below



MP3TAG will then run through all your files and create multiple genre= entries, which will now show correctly in MinimServer (and any other server that recognises the industry standard multiple tagging system).

Now that you have saved the action and tested it, you can select it to do your main collection; this is described in below.

2 - Using the Action on your collection

First thing to do is to browse to your collection, right click the folder you wish to change, then select MP3TAG. Below shows me doing this on a NAS based collection:



MP3TAG will read all the files in that folder, and this could take a while. The time taken depends on how many files you have, and also how fast your NAS is at reading them. On a Qnap TS-659 (RAID6) it takes 10 minutes per 10,000 files.

Once it has finished opening them, you can click on 'Edit' then 'Select all files', or simply use Ctrl+A.

Now that they are all selected, click on the 'Actions' button, then in the pop-up list, select the action you created and click on it. The below picture shows me selecting the one that I created in the above example (note that I have loads of other actions that I have created over the years, so your list will be far less cluttered than mine).

MP3TAG will then rattle through them and create the multi-genres. The time taken again depends on the speed of your NAS, but on my one, it takes about 3 minutes and 40 seconds per 10,000 files to write all the new genres.

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