Track titles prefixed by Artist tag when displaying m3u playlist contents

[simoncn]

(01-09-2014 17:14)Andre Gosselin Wrote:  Simon,
I think I found a way to suppress the #EXTINF lines in my playlist collection, by patching some scripts inside the MediaMonkey distribution and recreating the playlists from the database. I think MediaMonkey generates those lines to allow the backwards regeneration of the playlists inside the database from the m3u files, in case the database ever gets corrupted. Patching the scripts will make this impossible, but I never faced such a situation, and I am better protected against this eventuality by simply regularly backing up the database files per se, as I do now.

I understand your point about using #EXTINF to attach a title to items which lack this info. But what about items which do already have explicit title metadata (which I think, for consistency reasons, should be reported faithfully when querying the metadata in the control point, irrespective of the way the item is reached) ? Could the #EXTINF value be ignored in that case ?

This is somewhat difficult to implement because every audio item is required to have a title and MinimServer uses a default title of the filename if no title is specified as metadata. By the time the playlist processing is performed, this defaulting has already happened and there's no way to tell whether the title was original metadata or a default value.

Quote:Since I am confident to solve my problem by patching the MediaMonkey software, you could keep the change introduced in the last Minimserver update.

Thanks for this. I have already written and tested the code to revert the change. If anyone particularly wants the other approach, we can consider it again after a more extensive discussion.

My reasons for reverting it are:

1) It is likely to cause trouble for users who are expecting the previous behaviour.

2) It is inconsistent to take the title from #EXTINF but take all other metadata such as Artist and Album from the track file.

3) MinimServer ignores the duration from #EXTINF and uses the duration in the file. It is inconsistent to do the opposite for the title.

4) There appears to be an established convention that the #EXTINF title should contain "artist name - track name" rather than just "track name". It is inconsistent with this convention for MinimServer to assume the #EXTINF title is just the track name.

5) No-one has complained about the previous behaviour.

Quote:By the way, this raises the issue of how metadata could be explicitly attached to playlists, and how they could be managed through UPnP. Currently, metadata are all attached to tracks, which is not ideal since quite often they shoud be attached to higher level objects instead of being redundantly replicated in the object components. Consider the album for example, which should really be the object holding attributes like "publisher", "catalog number", "release date", "album art", etc. If we could attach attributes (tags) to playlists, then playlists could serve to define those higher level objects, like albums and compositions. Playlists could then be seen as tables similar to those used inside a relational database, and serve to implement some sort of data model, a concept which is sorely lacking in the current track-tagging scheme.

Regards

I agree with all this, but today's reality is the current imperfect scheme and I don't want to take on the task of trying to create something better and establish it as an industry standard.