Creating custom paths based on tags

[edj]

I make use of the Custom tags with audio files in a few ways but two applicable to this question:

Custom 1: The year and month I added something to my library, eg 18.10 for 2018-October, 22.03 for 2022-March, etc.

Custom 4: My top ten tracks of the year, using letters a-j, a being my top track and j being my 10th favourite. A little roundup of the year. In MediaMonkey it is easy to create auto playlists so that I can then show the top ten tracks for each year in a single playlist.

I would like to recreate something similar in MinimServer, whereby from the top level (ie where Album, Artist are listed) I can have a heading "Top Tracks" which leads to the year I added something to the library (based on the first two digits of Custom 1), and then when I click on that it lists out the ten tracks from that year, sorted alphabeticlly by Custom 4.

So the tree/path would look like
Top Tracks\Year of Purchase\Tracks

Is this possible?

If not, is it possible to do with another Custom field which is only the year of purchase (ie not year AND date) ?

[simbun]

It can be done, but there are some implications to what you're doing so you may not want to.

The first is that there's only one way to sort tracks (outside of an album track listing that sorts by tracknumber and then title) and that's to use items.sortTags={}, meaning that any time you view a list of tracks outside of an album it will be in the order of Custom4. You could fill the missing values in Custom4 with Title so it will mostly sort correctly (outside of your Top Tracks view), but you will still see the Top Tracks files out of order. I don't think I've ever looked at the '[n] items' list so this wouldn't be a problem for me, unless of course I also wanted Top Tracks of the Decade, which wouldn't be possible because you couldn't sort both correctly (unless the tracks of the year weren't in the tracks of the decade list, which is unlikely).

The second is that you'll need to set listViewAlbums below 10 (assuming that's the minimum number of top tracks per year). This is because if you've made an index selection and the resulting number of albums is below this number it jumps straight to Album view (I guess it would make more sense to only do this if you have complete albums remaining, but that could be a lot of additional processing), and to get the correct ordered track listing we need to view the '[n] items' index listing.


If you're still not put off:
You'd need to change your date field to YYYYMM, or create another with YYYY, or use tagUpdate to change it as YY.MM isn't a valid date format for MinimServer.

Then change the MinimServer configuration to:

Code:

indexTags:Custom1:Top Tracks
itemTags:Custom4
listViewAlbums:9
tagOptions: Custom1.yearOnly.index.sort, items.sortTags={Custom4}

Then when browsing you'd choose 'Top Tracks', make a year selection, and select the '[n] items' index to view the tracks.

[edj]

Thank you very much for this, very comprehensive indeed. Looks like I'd need to do some additional work!

One question - using tagUpdate - does that change the metadata of the individual files, or just in the minimserver database?

[simbun]

(08-01-2023 11:44)edj Wrote:  One question - using tagUpdate - does that change the metadata of the individual files, or just in the minimserver database?

The tagUpdate change is only within MinimServer.

You'd need something like:

Code:

@CUSTOM1=18.10
=CUSTOM1=2018
@CUSTOM1=18.11
=CUSTOM1=2018
@CUSTOM1=19.10
=CUSTOM1=2019

This overrides the CUSTOM1 tag.

If you use tagUpdate to change CUSTOM1 to just YYYY then you won't need:

Code:

tagOptions: Custom1.yearOnly.index.sort

Depending upon what tagging program you use you may be able to generate at least some of the data from there.