Different control points seeing different things

[simoncn]

(13-04-2015 17:51)DavidHB Wrote:  While the Album Art may be a factor, I'm not sure that it's the whole story. In another thread, Simon linked to the section of the MinimServer User Guide which says

" ... some control points (for example, the LUMIN app) create their own index lists using XML metadata information."

The whole idea of MinimServer's intelligent browsing feature is that the browse tree is constructed on the fly using MinimServer's own indexes. LUMIN is, in effect, duplicating something that it should leave MinimServer to do better. If this indexing process includes the caching of lots of album art, that will also be a factor. But the real problem is that LUMIN is doing in user time what MinimServer has already done in advance. Because Bubble and Kazoo use the MinimServer indexes (or at least that is what I infer from the way they present the browse tree), you don't get the overhead of duplicated effort, and the CP starts much more quickly.

To be fair, I doubt that things are really quite as simple as I have described. But unnecessary and unhelpful duplication of processing effort, and the over-riding of user choices (in this case, those made in configuring MinimServer) are surely to be avoided if at all possible.

David

As a server author, I would naturally agree with you that the server's organizational structure for how the library should be presented and browsed should be followed faithfully by control points.

If I were a control point author, I could imagine having the view that the server should be just a database and presentation decisions should be the responsibility of the control point.