While lying half asleep in bed I had a better idea and had to get up to try it out!
For one of my albums that exists in three versions, I manually added a suffix of [SS] to the Album tag for the SACD-Stereo version, added a suffix of [SM] to the Album tag for the SACD-Multichannel version and left the Album untouched for the CD version. All three versions thus now have different Album titles. I then reverted to mergeFolderAlbums= True.
I also deleted Album.displayFormat={$album^$disctype^ [^]} and added Group.displayFormat={$group^$disctype^ [^]}, which added a DiscType suffix to my custom Work tag.
The previous ambiguity created by multiple album instances, all with the same name, has now gone. So far, it's looking good. I will check it out in more detail tomorrow.
I now have a solution to my problem, but at the cost of creating 3 separate 'pseudo-albums' for each of my SACDs. I can live with that, though I would have preferred a solution that layered the CD/SS/SM options below a single album icon and didn't artificially inflate my album totals.
Playlists only show track titles, so I have also added my custom DiscType tag as a suffix to the Title tag. This makes it easier to use a playlist for such things as demonstrating the differences in sound quality between the Stereo SACD version and the CD version of the same track.
In case anyone else would find it useful, my latest MinimServer configuration is shown in the attachment below.
As a final comment, let me once again express my gratitude to Simon for creating such a powerful and flexible music server and backing it up with such excellent user support.
I'm not clear why mergeFolderAlbums= False doesnt work as hoped for it would seem if you get that working that would be the best way. But if you want a way to group those three albums I have a possible workaround. Add another tag to the files say albumGroup that would contain just the raw album name so would be the same for all three albums. Then add this albumGroup field to indexTags then at least you could browse by albumGroup and this would show just one value per album, then selecting a particular albumgroup would show the three albums. But it doesnt show a count, it would be nice if arbitary indextags had a count like 'albums' and 'items' do.
(05-06-2017 11:31)paultaylor Wrote: [ -> ]I'm not clear why mergeFolderAlbums= False doesnt work as hoped for it would seem if you get that working that would be the best way...
When I developed my ripping strategy several years ago, I knew that access to my music would be controlled by metadata tags, not physical disk location. However, I made a very deliberate decision to make the folder structure as clear as possible.
I save most of my classical CD rips in album folders within composer name folders. Within each album folder, I also have work subfolders for each work that spans more than one track. When a CD contains music by more than one composer, I save the album folders under a 'Classical compilations' folder. From the beginning, setting mergeFolderAlbums=True generated the browsing tree results I desired.
It's no more than speculation, but my recent negative experiences when trying out the mergeFolderAlbums=False option might possibly be due to my chosen folder structure.
I will experiment with your alternative proposal and let you know how I get on.
(05-06-2017 11:31)paultaylor Wrote: [ -> ]... if you want a way to group those three albums I have a possible workaround. Add another tag to the files say albumGroup that would contain just the raw album name so would be the same for all three albums. Then add this albumGroup field to indexTags then at least you could browse by albumGroup and this would show just one value per album, then selecting a particular albumgroup would show the three albums. But it doesnt show a count, it would be nice if arbitary indextags had a count like 'albums' and 'items' do.
I've tried out your proposal, but one issue is that AlbumGroup is not automatically associated with the cover art stored in my music files, so I don't get an array of pretty pictures (unlike Album). Do you know a way to fix that? I've looked at the Artwork section of the MinimServer online User Guide, but a solution is not obvious to me.
Good point I think at tag level MinimServer only understands artwork at Track, Group and Album level. Also when browsing by folder it pick up artwork in the same folder as the folder. It would be great if there was a way to associate artwork with any tag be it artist/composer/albumgroup/genre ecetera but this is not currently possible.
So the only other solution I can think of is to consider reorganizing your folder structure to the more typical artist/album folder, since this is the 'usual' way to organize things the mergeAlbum options may then work. For Works I don't think there is any need from a MinimServer pov for them to be part of the folder structure as they can be derived form the correct tag information. But clearly this would be quite a significant change for you to make.
The creation of 3 pseudo-albums for each SACD is only a minor issue and I wouldn't give up my existing folder structure to fix it. Using an Artist/Album folder structure is a very poor fit for classical music.
It was well worth pursuing your AlbumGroup suggestion, but it has problems of its own. It's possible that we are missing some clever alternative configuration that Simon will identify when he comes back from his holiday. In the meantime, I have now reverted to my previous indexing configuration and will live with 3 albums per SACD.
Why not using the DiscNumber, DiscSubTitle tags to separate them? With Album being identical for all of them, you will remain with one Album and can choose between Disc 1 (or CD), SACD or Multi or whatever you name it in DiscSubTitle.
(18-06-2017 16:09)GalaxyGe Wrote: [ -> ]Why not using the DiscNumber, DiscSubTitle tags to separate them? With Album being identical for all of them, you will remain with one Album and can choose between Disc 1 (or CD), SACD or Multi or whatever you name it in DiscSubTitle.
I already use the DiscNumber tag for its intended purpose. I assume that DiscSubTitle is a custom tag, as it doesn't appear by default in JRiver Media Center (the nearest similar tag name is Media Sub Type).
As previously mentioned, my custom tag called DiscType identifies every track ripped from an SACD as either CD, SS or SM, but that doesn't have the grouping capability of my Work tag. You therefore get all the variants listed together unless I give each variant a slightly different Album title.
As far as I can see, your suggestion to use a custom DiscSubTitle tag would suffer from the same problem as my DiscType tag if I used only one Album title for each SACD.