Extra sub-albums for multi-disc album

[Servatius]

(23-05-2016 09:14)simoncn Wrote:  The first thing to check is whether MinimServer is finding an extra copy of the album files when it is scanning your library. This can happen if your content directory settings are pulling in something like a backup folder or recycle bin that contains a previous version of the album files. To check this, change your content directory to point at the top-level folder for the correct version of the album files and then perform a MinimServer rescan (not restart). Do you see any duplication in <n> albums and/or <n> items?

Thank you very much for looking into this. I now understand the reason of the problem. All my audio files are multi-track FLAC files with embedded album art and an embedded cue sheet containing all tracks of one CD. So I have just one file per CD, which is very practical when copying a CD onto a smart phone. I do this also because of the 256-character path name limitation of Windows (because album title plus track title is often too long).

I manage and tag these multi-track files on my PC and use the convert feature of foobar2000 to copy them into the MinimServer content directory on an external hard disc, which I then connect to a Raspberry Pi where I run MinimServer. I use the following pattern in foobar 2000 to split the multi-track files into single-track files for use by MinimServer:

Code:

%album artist%/%filename%/[%discnumber%.]%tracknumber%

%filename% here is the name of the multi-track FLAC file (without extension) and is being used as the subfolder name for the single-track files in the MinimServer content directory.

The following happens for the 10-disc album with the Bruckner Symphonies conducted by Günter Wand: As I did not set ALBUMARTIST but set ARTIST to "Anton Bruckner", %album artist% evaluated to "Anton Bruckner", so all subfolders were placed in a folder "Anton Bruckner".

The following happens for the 41-disc album with the symphonies conducted by Claudio Abbado: Because I set ALBUMARTIST to "Claudio Abbado" and ARTIST to the name of the composer, %album artist% evaluated to two values, "Claudio Abbado" and the composer name. So the 5 CDs with the Bruckner symphonies from that album were copied to the folder "Claudio Abbado" and to the folder "Anton Bruckner". I was not aware that %album artist% includes ARTIST when ALBUMARTIST is set and that I got the converted file twice.

This explains that the problem went away with the folder "Claudio Abbado" as only folder in the MinimServer content directory but reappeared when I added the folder "Anton Bruckner".

To solve the problem I have to use a convert pattern that does not depend on any tag value (except for the disc and track number in the single-track audio file names). I'll use the following pattern in future:

Code:

$replace($directory_path(%path%),D:\Path\To\Multi-Track\Flac\Base\Directory\,)/%filename%/[%discnumber%.]%tracknumber%

I do apologize for wasting your time. I'm very sorry.

Servatius