Hello from new user

[jamief]

A quick post to say Hi to everyone here and thank you to Simon for such a great piece of software!

I have about 400GB of music in 40K files, mostly in FLAC and mirrored in AAC for the iP#d ecosystem. I still buy quite a few of the little silver things (including a meaningful number of SACDs). My collection is primarily classical, a fair bit of jazz and some other stuff.

In terms of infrastructure, I use a Synology DS213+, Oppo BDP-105, Arcam amplifier, Dynaudio speakers, Minimserver, Kinsky and I have a Sonos system. Use iPhone/iPad as control h/w. I have fibre internet, a mix of wired, mains-extended and wireless ethernet.

Previously I was struggling with Synology Audiostation & DS Audio, playing into the Oppo's async USB input from the DS213.

Tags in my classical rips include Artist, ArtistSort, AlbumArtist (for contributing artists), AlbumArtistSort, Composer, ComposerSort, Conductor, ConductorSort, Album "Composer: work (artist date)", AlbumSort, Title (usually movement name), Track (movement # of work), work, Genre (Classical/Jazz/Pop/Spoken), Opus, Period, Style (Choral/Chamber/Orchestral/etc), Instrument, Location (of recording), Date (year of recording), Label, Catalog #, Soloists, SoloistsSort, Orchestra (Band), Chorus, Source (CD/SACD/download and resolution).

I use dbPowerAmp for ripping & transcoding and tag clean-up in Mp3Tag.

I haven't worked out how to make sorting work the way I'd like it to with Minimserver yet, but I'm still reading and learning. If I can, I'd like to use the 2 tag approach to sorting (as should be clear from the list above).

It has been a fantastic experience to install Minimserver, add a couple of entries to the config page, then start browsing my collection by fields like instrument, period, style, recording location, label - finally unlocking all that info I've been typing into my tags for years!

I only wish the experience with the server was echoed in the renderer. I've really struggled to get the Oppo to reliably play back streamed FLAC files (similar to issues shared by many others), though my latest configuration seems better than with DS Audio / Audiostation. I've got Kinsky installed on my iPhone - playback stops after a few tracks, not sure if this is the iPhone going to sleep - need to play more.

Jamie