I am new to minim server. I have several libraries of music in exactly the order I want and then I have other libraries where artist, album, track is what I want. Artist, Album, Track works great right out of the box, but I cannot find how to make it play the other libraries in file order. Any ideas?
You don’t say what control point you are using but you should see something called Folder View as well as Artist, Album etc.
This will show your music in the structure of you folders on disk
I do use folder view. When I look at the folders where I have it organized by artist and album it plays in the proper track order when I select an album. In the other folders I have individual songs that are in filename order. I structured the filenames to be in the order I wanted them to play in. In folder view it does not play these in filename order. I am not really sure what order it is using.
I think you have to create playlists to achieve this
By default, files in folder view are sorted first by album name (as tagged) and then by track number (as tagged) within each album.
You can change this default sort order by setting folder.sortTags in the tagOptions property. For example, to sort tracks by title (as tagged) you can set tagOptions to folder.sortTags={Title}.
This will sort tracks by title (as tagged) and not by filename, so you might not get the results you want if the title (as tagged) doesn't match the filename.
If you want to completely ignore all titles (as tagged) and always use the filename as the title, you can set the aliasTags property to Title:nil. In combination with folder.sortTags={Title}, this will give you the sort order you want in folder view but might produce unexpected results elsewhere.
If each library needs to be sorted differently, and each is separated at the filesystem level then you could use different profiles to achieve this. You can only have one active profile though (you can switch between them from the MinimServer 2 web configuration page), so it does mean that you'll never have ALL your music available at the same time.
See 'Creating and selecting a custom browsing profile'
here. I know that page is targetted to Linux but the profile section applies across the board and I don't know what system you're building on.
This functionality is only available with a full or during a trial license.
Thanks for the feedback. I think I understand the sort order now. I guess playlists are the answer. I will look at what I need to do to make that happen. I had a playlist (m3u) in the library at one point when I was using Emby. When it came up in Minim I got a no content or some such error so I deleted it from the library to remove clutter and to avoid confusing myself.
(13-06-2022 14:56)tpmcghee Wrote: [ -> ]I guess playlists are the answer. I will look at what I need to do to make that happen.
Playlists - .m3u format - are a good solution, and have the merit of being in plain text, but they are a bit of a faff to create manually. If you use Windows, there is the ancient but excellent Playlist Creator application, originally written for XP but still working on my Windows 11 machine. The host website no longer seems to exist, but the most recent install file - 3.6.2 - is still available on respectable download sites.
With Playlist Creator, you simply drag and drop music files from your library into the Playlist Creator window. You can set the file path to be relative to your music library, and, if you are creating playlists for non-Windows machines (including NASs), you can also tell Playlist Creator to use forward rather than backslashes in file paths. Once you store the .m3u file in the folder tree of the MinimServer content directory and do a rescan, the playlist will appear in the Playlists entry in the MinimServer top level menu.
David
Thanks. I use mp3tag, freeware software, to edit metadata and it will also create a m3u in the same order that files are in for a whole folder which is what I was trying to accomplish. I then had to do an edit and replace with notepad to get to a relative file path, but it wasn't too time consuming or difficult. I stored the m3u in the same folder it was referencing and re-scanned. Everything is working the way I want it to now. Thanks everyone for the help, advice and ideas.
FYI and for future reference, MinimServer reads both absolute and relative paths in .m3u playlists. Using relative playlists is good practice in case the library is moved to some other location in the file system but is not a requirement of MinimServer. Similarly, using forward slashes is good practice in case the library is copied to a Linux system (for example, a NAS) but is not a requirement of MinimServer.