Minimserver on a Melco with Lumin

[DavidHB]

Hi, Don

You've probably spotted that, on the Linn forum, there is a thread that invites folk to share their MinimServer properties (which I have done). Will it, or any thread like it, be of use to you? To some extent, but (I guess) not as much as you are hoping.

Fortunately, your use case as you described it is reasonably close to the MinimServer defaults, so my advice would be not to change anything except to remove a specific annoyance. Although the MinimServer User Guide looks daunting because it is so comprehensive, the trick is to skim read until you come to something that looks like a fix for the problem, and then read that bit carefully; you will find that it's very clearly written.

Of course, as with any server, you need to ensure that any tags of interest to you are fully and consistently populated. If your Paul Simon albums have ARTIST or ALBUMARTIST tags that variously contain 'Simon, Paul', 'Paul Simon', 'P. Simon' and so on, you will need to ensure that all the tags are consistent if you want to use them for selection. Likewise, if you want to order your Artist names by surname rather than first name, you should read up the reverseName Tag Option. If, for instance, you enter ARTIST as 'Simon, Paul', MinimServer can index it in that order but display it as 'Paul Simon'. A tag editor such as MP3Tag makes it almost trivially simple to amend large numbers of tags in one go, so putting tags in order is well worth the effort.

As regards the problem you have with 'The Beatles' etc., step 1 is to make sure that artist naming is consistent, and Step 2 is to include in your tagOptions property an entry such as

all.ignore.sort={The,A,An,Der,Die,Das,​Ein,Eine,Le,La,L',Les,Un,Une,Il,El}

which is the one I currently use. This will ensure that the definite and indefinite articles in English and several other languages are ignored when indexes are compiled, so that The Beatles are listed under 'B' and not under 'T'.

If you concentrate on one change at a time, and ask for specific advice as necessary, you will find that your confidence grows with each setting that you master. As you probably don't need to change all that much in any case, this shouldn't take too long.

David