playback of containers

[simoncn]

(02-07-2015 13:13)adrian Wrote:  I'm curious about how playback of a container works in uPNP because of the behavior I'm observing from my control point, the Olive ONE.

They added the ability to play back containers, which was previously impossible. But it only worked to a depth of 3 levels. So it seems that it was searching the tree to make a play list based on everything it could find. They have now increased the depth of the search. I selected "genre->Finnish" to get to a container with 12 tracks in it, but when I asked my control point to play it, it assembled a list of 15 copies of the 12 tracks, like it found it multiple different ways in its search.

So here's my question: is there some natural support in uPNP for playing a container? In other words, are the people programming my device idiots? It seems to me that if they are searching the tree there's no way to reliably get the right result.

Traditionally, UPnP servers have organised the music library as a strict hierarchy, with each item (track) belonging to exactly one container and each comtainer also belonging to exactly one parent container. For example. the top container might be Genre, with Artist below Genre and Album below Artist. With this kind of library, a recursive browse of a specific Genre container would produce a list of unique items with no duplicates.

MinimServer doesn't organise its library in this way. For example, you could find the same item by browsing via Genre > Artist > Album or via Genre > Composer > Date > Artist or via Date > Composer > Artist > Genre. This means that a recursive browse of a specific genre will usually find the same item in multiple container hierarchies. With most control points, this results in many duplicates for the item. (A few control points can detect and eliminate these duplicates.)

The simplest solution is to select Genre > Finnish > 12 items and play the '12 items' container instead of playing the 'Finnish' container. MinimServer ensures that all duplicates are eliminated from the '12 items' container, so this will work as expected.