MinimServer Forum

I've not yet configured and run MinimServer but have started reading the documentation. I'm not clear on what tags MinimServer will reference in compiling your library for presentation and internal logic purposes. Is there a single reference that lists all tags that MinimServer supports?

Also, almost all of my albums (FLAC based) have tag entries that contain multiple entries for a number of tags, as well as custom tags I'd like to be able to leverage. As an example, a typical track's tags may look like this:
____________________________
albumartist=Lindsey Buckingham
album=Seeds We Sow
artist=Lindsey Buckingham
compilation=0
composer=Keith Richards
composer=Mick Jagger
date=September 6, 2011
genre=Pop/Rock
mood=Ambitious\\Atmospheric\\Bittersweet\\Complex\\Confident\\Dreamy\\Elegant\\E​nergetic\\Enigmatic\\Exciting\\Intimate\\Literate\\Lively\\Lush\\Optimistic\\Poi​gnant\\Refined\\Rousing\\Sophisticated\\Summery
rating=4
review=Since resuming his solo recording career with 2006's Under the Skin... <snip>
style=Contemporary Singer/Songwriter\\Alternative Singer/Songwriter\\Adult Alternative Pop/Rock\\Alternative/Indie Rock\\Contemporary Pop/Rock
theme=Everyday Life\\Regret\\Relationships\\Relaxation\\Reminiscing\\Small Gathering
title=She Smiled Sweetly
tracknumber=11
____________________________

I gather from the documentation that MinimServer does not handle multiple entries for a given tag e.g. the composer tags in the above example and that the tag should be written as a single delimited entry for MinimServer to use it i.e.: composer=Keith Richards\\Mick Jagger

Based on the tagging scheme above:

• would MinimServer be able to leverage style, mood and theme metadata
• how would it handle the date entry given it's not simply stated as "2011"
• how does it distinguish between album artists and compilations (in my tagging scheme compilations have a compilation=1 tag whereas artist albums may or may not have a compilation=0 tag. Artist albums may include multiple artists in a single track entry, but where this is the case there is always an 'albumartist' tag. Compilations on the other hand will have one or more artist entries for each track and no "albumartist" tag
  

(15-11-2012 06:47)audiomuze Wrote: [ -> ]I've not yet configured and run MinimServer but have started reading the documentation. I'm not clear on what tags MinimServer will reference in compiling your library for presentation and internal logic purposes. Is there a single reference that lists all tags that MinimServer supports?

MinimServer can support any tag name. There's a configuration property named indexTags that you can use to customize the list of tag names that MinimServer will scan and index.

Quote:Also, almost all of my albums (FLAC based) have tag entries that contain multiple entries for a number of tags, as well as custom tags I'd like to be able to leverage. As an example, a typical track's tags may look like this:
____________________________
albumartist=Lindsey Buckingham
album=Seeds We Sow
artist=Lindsey Buckingham
compilation=0
composer=Keith Richards
composer=Mick Jagger
date=September 6, 2011
genre=Pop/Rock
mood=Ambitious\\Atmospheric\\Bittersweet\\Complex\\Confident\\Dreamy\\Elegant\\E​nergetic\\Enigmatic\\Exciting\\Intimate\\Literate\\Lively\\Lush\\Optimistic\\Poi​gnant\\Refined\\Rousing\\Sophisticated\\Summery
rating=4
review=Since resuming his solo recording career with 2006's Under the Skin... <snip>
style=Contemporary Singer/Songwriter\\Alternative Singer/Songwriter\\Adult Alternative Pop/Rock\\Alternative/Indie Rock\\Contemporary Pop/Rock
theme=Everyday Life\\Regret\\Relationships\\Relaxation\\Reminiscing\\Small Gathering
title=She Smiled Sweetly
tracknumber=11
____________________________

I gather from the documentation that MinimServer does not handle multiple entries for a given tag e.g. the composer tags in the above example and that the tag should be written as a single delimited entry for MinimServer to use it i.e.: composer=Keith Richards\\Mick Jagger

There might be a bit of terminology confusion here. MinimServer does handle multiple tags with the same name, so

composer=Keith Richards
composer=Mick Jagger

will be handled correctly as two different composers for the same track.

Regarding the \\ separator, Mp3tag uses this in its user interface to represent multiple separate tags. So in the Mp3tag user interface, you would put 'Keith Richards\\Mick Jagger' in the Composer entry field to achieve the above result.

What's not clear to me is whether the entries in your above example that contain \\ actually have the \\ characters inside the FLAC/Vorbis tag value. If so, MinimServer won't handle them as you're expecting. If the \\ characters aren't physically present, but are being used as a visual indication of multiple separate tag values (as with Mp3tag), MinimServer will handle this OK.

Quote:Based on the tagging scheme above:

• would MinimServer be able to leverage style, mood and theme metadata
• how would it handle the date entry given it's not simply stated as "2011"
• how does it distinguish between album artists and compilations (in my tagging scheme compilations have a compilation=1 tag whereas artist albums may or may not have a compilation=0 tag. Artist albums may include multiple artists in a single track entry, but where this is the case there is always an 'albumartist' tag. Compilations on the other hand will have one or more artist entries for each track and no "albumartist" tag
  

MinimServer will scan and index the style, mood and theme tags as long as you add these to the indexTags property.

MinimServer expects dates to be in the form "yyyy" or ''yyyy-mm-dd", or something similar with yyyy as the first four characters. Is there any documentation that describes the standard format options for this tag value?

MinimServer doesn't do anything with the 'compilation' tag (though you can add it to indexTags if you wish). You can achieve the same effect by using an 'albumartist' tag. For example, you could set 'albumartist' to 'Compilation' for these albums. Can you explain the benefits of having a separate tag to identify compilation albums?

(15-11-2012 10:13)simoncn Wrote: [ -> ]What's not clear to me is whether the entries in your above example that contain \\ actually have the \\ characters inside the FLAC/Vorbis tag value. If so, MinimServer won't handle them as you're expecting. If the \\ characters aren't physically present, but are being used as a visual indication of multiple separate tag values (as with Mp3tag), MinimServer will handle this OK.

The tags in question have "\\" written into the tag entry as the delimiter. I believe mp3tag does much the same thing hence its inclusion of functions to join and split tag entries having the same tagname. puddletag does the same - if you merge entries you end up with composer="Keith Richards\\Mick Jagger" being written into the tag entry. If you split entries you get two discrete entries, viz:
composer=Keith Richards
composer=Mick Jagger

If I recall correctly mp3tag will by default generate the latter rather than the former, but present the entry as the former when displayed.

(15-11-2012 10:13)simoncn Wrote: [ -> ]MinimServer expects dates to be in the form "yyyy" or ''yyyy-mm-dd", or something similar with yyyy as the first four characters. Is there any documentation that describes the standard format options for this tag value?

Not as far as I know. Logitechmediaserver correctly identifies the year component of the string and uses it to classify the tracks, so it's never been an issue for me. It would be great if MinimServer could do the same, failing which I'll have to ignore the date in my browsing.

(15-11-2012 10:13)simoncn Wrote: [ -> ]MinimServer doesn't do anything with the 'compilation' tag (though you can add it to indexTags if you wish). You can achieve the same effect by using an 'albumartist' tag. For example, you could set 'albumartist' to 'Compilation' for these albums. Can you explain the benefits of having a separate tag to identify compilation albums?

Logitechmediaserver (LMS) doesn't require the artist for compilations to be set as "Various Artists" or something similar. Using a compilation tag serves to inform LMS's scanning routine that the track in question is or isn't part of a compilation. Having said that, LMS uses other means to arrive at the same outcome where the compilation tag is not added. LMS' logic (as far as I've understood it) is as follows:

For any album where there is no change in artist= entries, and the album is the same, it's deemed a discrete album by that artist.

If there is a change of artist but the album name is the same, then there are as many albums by that name as there are artists (unless the files are in the same folder, in which case it's deemed a compilation)

If, however, the tracks contain an albumartist entry and they're the same across all tracks with the same album name then it's again deemed a single album by the albumartist. This enables you to deal with situations where you have a main artist and other contributors on the same album e.g.

if you take Lee Ritenour's Six String Theory:

Each track has a number of artists, so without albumartist LMS would see a compilation album, with albumartist it'd see a single album with many contributing artists. The full album would list under albumartist and those tracks on which a particular artist appears would list under the respective artist as well.

The part lacking in LMS when browsing an artist's discography is not distinguishing presentation of artist album listings vs compilations on which an artist appears, so the compilations are listed in an amongst their main works, which is frustrating.

Unrelated to the Compilation tag discussion, but here goes anyhow...

Equally, the album would appear if any of the following genre's were selected:
genre=Blues
genre=Easy Listening
genre=Jazz
genre=Pop/Rock

where things would become really interesting is if you could select one or more of the genre's and filter your collection that way, doing the same with style and mood or any other tags that one desires as part of the same filtering process.


Nirvana would be being able to say play me a random selection of songs from my album collection where all of the following are met:
genre=a, b or c
style= d, e, f or g
mood= h or i
and whilst you're at it, don't repeat an artist for 25 tracks...

(16-11-2012 10:21)audiomuze Wrote: [ -> ]The tags in question have "\\" written into the tag entry as the delimiter. I believe mp3tag does much the same thing hence its inclusion of functions to join and split tag entries having the same tagname. puddletag does the same - if you merge entries you end up with composer="Keith Richards\\Mick Jagger" being written into the tag entry. If you split entries you get two discrete entries, viz:
composer=Keith Richards
composer=Mick Jagger

If I recall correctly mp3tag will by default generate the latter rather than the former, but present the entry as the former when displayed.

I've only seen Mp3tag generating the latter and displaying the former. I wasn't aware that it had a "join" option. If the '\\' form is generated in the audio file, this won't work with MinimServer.

Quote:Not as far as I know. Logitechmediaserver correctly identifies the year component of the string and uses it to classify the tracks, so it's never been an issue for me. It would be great if MinimServer could do the same, failing which I'll have to ignore the date in my browsing.

It would be possible to extend MinimServer to parse this format, but in order for this to be useful, it would also be necessary to add support for date index sorting by computed date (presumably with configurable date range groupings) rather than just sorting by the date string in the tag. This would be quite a bit of work.

Quote:Logitechmediaserver (LMS) doesn't require the artist for compilations to be set as "Various Artists" or something similar. Using a compilation tag serves to inform LMS's scanning routine that the track in question is or isn't part of a compilation. Having said that, LMS uses other means to arrive at the same outcome where the compilation tag is not added. LMS' logic (as far as I've understood it) is as follows:

For any album where there is no change in artist= entries, and the album is the same, it's deemed a discrete album by that artist.

If there is a change of artist but the album name is the same, then there are as many albums by that name as there are artists (unless the files are in the same folder, in which case it's deemed a compilation)

If, however, the tracks contain an albumartist entry and they're the same across all tracks with the same album name then it's again deemed a single album by the albumartist. This enables you to deal with situations where you have a main artist and other contributors on the same album e.g.

if you take Lee Ritenour's Six String Theory:

Each track has a number of artists, so without albumartist LMS would see a compilation album, with albumartist it'd see a single album with many contributing artists. The full album would list under albumartist and those tracks on which a particular artist appears would list under the respective artist as well.

Thanks for this detailed description. It's very interesting that MinimServer has arrived at almost exactly the same algorithm for grouping tracks into albums, completely independently!

From your description, I think the only case where compilation=1 would make a difference is where tracks with the same album name have different artists and also appear in different folders. With compilation=1, these would be taken as belonging to the same album (which might be bad luck if you happen to have another compilation album with the same name). Without compilation=1, these would be taken as belonging to separate albums, one per folder.

Quote:The part lacking in LMS when browsing an artist's discography is not distinguishing presentation of artist album listings vs compilations on which an artist appears, so the compilations are listed in an amongst their main works, which is frustrating.

MinimServer doesn't have a "main" vs. "appearing" artist distinction, but you can achieve a similar result by tagging the main artist of all your albums with albumartist. In this case, the Artist index would show the main artists only, and the All Artists index would show the appearing artists.

Quote:Unrelated to the Compilation tag discussion, but here goes anyhow...

Equally, the album would appear if any of the following genre's were selected:
genre=Blues
genre=Easy Listening
genre=Jazz
genre=Pop/Rock

where things would become really interesting is if you could select one or more of the genre's and filter your collection that way, doing the same with style and mood or any other tags that one desires as part of the same filtering process.

You're describing exactly how MinimServer works! You can filter the current selection using any tags in that selection. If the selection contains tags that are shared by all items in the selection (and therefore wouldn't perform any filtering), MinimServer doesn't show those tags.

Quote:Nirvana would be being able to say play me a random selection of songs from my album collection where all of the following are met:
genre=a, b or c
style= d, e, f or g
mood= h or i
and whilst you're at it, don't repeat an artist for 25 tracks...

What is Nirvana?

(16-11-2012 11:46)simoncn Wrote: [ -> ]If the '\\' form is generated in the audio file, this won't work with MinimServer

Easily handled by a single puddletag action to split artist, genre, style & mood tags so that each has multiple entries where appropriate.

(16-11-2012 11:46)simoncn Wrote: [ -> ]It would be possible to extend MinimServer to parse this format, but in order for this to be useful, it would also be necessary to add support for date index sorting by computed date (presumably with configurable date range groupings) rather than just sorting by the date string in the tag. This would be quite a bit of work.

I'll do without year - if I get desperate I'll do write an action in puddletag to write my dates to a different tag as backup and just write the rightmost four digits to the date tag.

Quote:MinimServer doesn't have a "main" vs. "appearing" artist distinction, but you can achieve a similar result by tagging the main artist of all your albums with albumartist. In this case, the Artist index would show the main artists only, and the All Artists index would show the appearing artists.

Would you consider enhancing it so that it could? An ideal view of an artist's work in one's library would look something like this:

Albums released by artist:
a
b
c
d

Albums on which artist guests/appears:
e
f
g
h

Internally the distinction is the artist name appearing in albumartist vs just in artist. This way if one wants to distinguish, all that's required from tagging is that you set albumartist wherever the album is released by the artist. Any occurrence of an artist's name in an artist tag where the artist name is not also in the albumartist tag means the artist is guesting, whether it be on a compilation or another artist's album.

Quote:You're describing exactly how MinimServer works! You can filter the current selection using any tags in that selection. If the selection contains tags that are shared by all items in the selection (and therefore wouldn't perform any filtering), MinimServer doesn't show those tags.

Does MinimServer enable one to select multiple entries in a given criteria e.g. two or more selected genres as a filter?

Quote:What is Nirvana?

in this case, I'm referring to my dream goal

(16-11-2012 12:28)audiomuze Wrote: [ -> ]Would you consider enhancing it so that it could? An ideal view of an artist's work in one's library would look something like this:

Albums released by artist:
a
b
c
d

Albums on which artist guests/appears:
e
f
g
h

Internally the distinction is the artist name appearing in albumartist vs just in artist. This way if one wants to distinguish, all that's required from tagging is that you set albumartist wherever the album is released by the artist. Any occurrence of an artist's name in an artist tag where the artist name is not also in the albumartist tag means the artist is guesting, whether it be on a compilation or another artist's album.

I don't think any enhancement is needed. If you do the tagging as you described, you'll see main artists listed under AlbumArtist and guest artists listed under All Artists.

Quote:Does MinimServer enable one to select multiple entries in a given criteria e.g. two or more selected genres as a filter?

You can't create an "or" filter with multiple values. This might be possible when MinimServer supports UPnP search in the future, depending on the capabilities of the control point. You can do "and" filtering by selecting one genre first and then selecting additional genres later.

Quote:in this case, I'm referring to my dream goal

Sorry for misunderstanding. I thought it might be a cool new product.