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simoncn · 15-03-2012, 22:44

(15-03-2012 13:19)Cableguy Wrote: Simon,
First of all, a HUGE thank you for your great work with MinimServer! You share a lot of your time, knowledge and skills when making this happen, and you contribute a lot to the music loving community!

Thanks for this. I've enjoyed doing it, and it's been great to have these interactions with fellow music enthusiasts!

Quote:Now a few questions / requests.

1. Initial letters – I have a big album collection (around 3500 albums) and it would be good in that situation to be able to choose Artist/Album Artist/All Artists by their initial letter. Would it be possible to make that optional?

Yes, it's possible. Ideally this could/should be done on the control point side, but it seems that no control points have a good implementation of this currently. Given this, I think I'll need to add it as a server option.

Quote:2. Compilations / Various Artists – If understand it correctly, MinimServer lists such albums under each contributing artist? It would be great if it (maybe optionally) was possible to do like either Twonky or Asset does it (i.e. Twonky lets you specify a location where all located albums are presented to the control point under Various, and Asset uses the COMPILATION tag set to =1)

I think you can get what you need by using the ALBUMARTIST tag on all these compilation albums and searching by the Artist index. If you do this, you won't see any contributing artists. If you ever want to find tracks with a particular contributing artist, you can search by the All Artists index.

Quote:3. Albums by Artist sorting – by this I mean (and this would be like a dream feature to me, as it would make the browsing more like looking in the CD shelf!) that you choose eg All Artists (or Album Artist or Artists), and then choose a new sort option “Albums by Artist” which then presents all ALBUMS sorted by the artist.

So if you own four albums (eg AC/DC – Stiff Upper Lip, Beach Boys – Pet Sounds, Beatles – Let It Be and Rolling Stones – Sticky Fingers),

The control point will now show album art for these four albums in the order listed in the brackets above.

You can do this already by using the Properties dialog to set the albumSortTags property to Artist, then selecting the "xxxx Albums" choice from the home container.

Quote:This could be enhanced further by letting the user chose Initial Letter as a third step before presenting the albums, and even further (this would be amazingly great if possible!) if shown (after Initial Letter was choosen) sorted by Date!

Do you think this would be possible?

The frst of these would be possible when Initial Letter is supported. For the second of these, if I understand your request correctly, you can already do it by setting the albumSortTags property to Artist, Date. This will show the albums in artist order, and will sort any albums with the same artist by reverse date order.