MinimServer Forum

First of all, LMK say how much I enjoy using Minimserver and thank you for answering my questions. With the maturity of the software, you must have previously heard many of the same questions, so I appreciate the help.
Likewise passing on a user’s appreciation hopefully never get old!

My question is with the Recently played or Recently Added features.
I understand that these features are managed through the played-xxx.txt files, which include a timestamp for each entry.
It is fantastic that Minimserver creates a special case for these features and allows for up to three different predefined time groups.
However, I am interested through some display format when viewing either list, including the actual time the track was played or added.
This would enable me to more accurately determine when a particular track was played or added when I look at the list view.

Does such a capability already exist?

Some additional thoughts are.
1. Ideally, I would prefer to only see the timestamp when viewing the Recent list, and not when viewing other list views. I was wondering if it is possible to use a display format specifically for the Recently Played and/or Recently Added information, rather than reusing Album.displayFormat. I understand that Minimserver knows it is using its special feature, reading from the played-xxx.txt files or its specially named *Recent… index, so perhaps it could reference a specialized display format (if set).
2. Having some flexibility in formatting the date would be beneficial, particularly for the international audience for Minimserver.
3. It would be great to have control over the sort order of the Recently Played and/or Recently Added list. Basing solely on timestamp when the track was referenced is fine, but further control through a some field.sort property for Recently Played and/or Recently Added to include other fields would add flexibility

Thanks again

Thanks for your words of appreciation for MinimServer and for your suggestions for additional configuration options for the recently added/played feature.

There are more than three predefined time groups for recently added and played files. The groupings in the recently added/played indexes are as follows:
Last day
Last week
Last month
Last 3 months
Current year
Previous years (can be divided into one or more year ranges)

Some of these groups might not be shown. For example, if the "last day" and "last week" groups have the same contents, only the "last day" group is shown.

When designing the recently added/played feature, the goal was to provide a simple way for the user to see which files had been added or played recently, not to provide exact details of when files in the library were added or last played. The time groups are shorter for the most recent files because most users will be more interested in seeing these files than seeing files that have been last played or added many months or years ago.

The goal was also to make this feature easy to use without a large number of configuration options. For all features, there is a trade-off between configurability and complexity. Adding configuration options such as those you have suggested would add complexity to the internal implementation and (perhaps more importantly) would make the description of the feature more complex, making it harder for users to understand how to use the feature. There is a fine balance between functionality, configurabilty and complexity and I think the balance for this feature is about right at present.