What tags does MinimServer support?

[simoncn]

(16-11-2012 10:21)audiomuze Wrote:  The tags in question have "\\" written into the tag entry as the delimiter. I believe mp3tag does much the same thing hence its inclusion of functions to join and split tag entries having the same tagname. puddletag does the same - if you merge entries you end up with composer="Keith Richards\\Mick Jagger" being written into the tag entry. If you split entries you get two discrete entries, viz:
composer=Keith Richards
composer=Mick Jagger

If I recall correctly mp3tag will by default generate the latter rather than the former, but present the entry as the former when displayed.

I've only seen Mp3tag generating the latter and displaying the former. I wasn't aware that it had a "join" option. If the '\\' form is generated in the audio file, this won't work with MinimServer.

Quote:Not as far as I know. Logitechmediaserver correctly identifies the year component of the string and uses it to classify the tracks, so it's never been an issue for me. It would be great if MinimServer could do the same, failing which I'll have to ignore the date in my browsing.

It would be possible to extend MinimServer to parse this format, but in order for this to be useful, it would also be necessary to add support for date index sorting by computed date (presumably with configurable date range groupings) rather than just sorting by the date string in the tag. This would be quite a bit of work.

Quote:Logitechmediaserver (LMS) doesn't require the artist for compilations to be set as "Various Artists" or something similar. Using a compilation tag serves to inform LMS's scanning routine that the track in question is or isn't part of a compilation. Having said that, LMS uses other means to arrive at the same outcome where the compilation tag is not added. LMS' logic (as far as I've understood it) is as follows:

For any album where there is no change in artist= entries, and the album is the same, it's deemed a discrete album by that artist.

If there is a change of artist but the album name is the same, then there are as many albums by that name as there are artists (unless the files are in the same folder, in which case it's deemed a compilation)

If, however, the tracks contain an albumartist entry and they're the same across all tracks with the same album name then it's again deemed a single album by the albumartist. This enables you to deal with situations where you have a main artist and other contributors on the same album e.g.

if you take Lee Ritenour's Six String Theory:

Each track has a number of artists, so without albumartist LMS would see a compilation album, with albumartist it'd see a single album with many contributing artists. The full album would list under albumartist and those tracks on which a particular artist appears would list under the respective artist as well.

Thanks for this detailed description. It's very interesting that MinimServer has arrived at almost exactly the same algorithm for grouping tracks into albums, completely independently!

From your description, I think the only case where compilation=1 would make a difference is where tracks with the same album name have different artists and also appear in different folders. With compilation=1, these would be taken as belonging to the same album (which might be bad luck if you happen to have another compilation album with the same name). Without compilation=1, these would be taken as belonging to separate albums, one per folder.

Quote:The part lacking in LMS when browsing an artist's discography is not distinguishing presentation of artist album listings vs compilations on which an artist appears, so the compilations are listed in an amongst their main works, which is frustrating.

MinimServer doesn't have a "main" vs. "appearing" artist distinction, but you can achieve a similar result by tagging the main artist of all your albums with albumartist. In this case, the Artist index would show the main artists only, and the All Artists index would show the appearing artists.

Quote:Unrelated to the Compilation tag discussion, but here goes anyhow...

Equally, the album would appear if any of the following genre's were selected:
genre=Blues
genre=Easy Listening
genre=Jazz
genre=Pop/Rock

where things would become really interesting is if you could select one or more of the genre's and filter your collection that way, doing the same with style and mood or any other tags that one desires as part of the same filtering process.

You're describing exactly how MinimServer works! You can filter the current selection using any tags in that selection. If the selection contains tags that are shared by all items in the selection (and therefore wouldn't perform any filtering), MinimServer doesn't show those tags.

Quote:Nirvana would be being able to say play me a random selection of songs from my album collection where all of the following are met:
genre=a, b or c
style= d, e, f or g
mood= h or i
and whilst you're at it, don't repeat an artist for 25 tracks...

What is Nirvana?