Control Apps

[schelomo]

This question is not specifically about Minimserver, but I'm not sure where else to put it. I'm completely new to streaming and feeling somewhat confused, and really would appreciate any advice.

My goal is to stream a library from a QNAP NAS to an Auralic Aries Mini, which I would then like to control with an iPad app. Ideally, I would like the control app to be able to display the "Artists" list according to the "Sort Artist" order. A utopian ideal would be to have the "Genre" tag act as a filter on "Artist" (thus displaying only the artists within that genre), and for these artists to follow "Sort Artist" order. But I fear that may be a bridge too far, and for now I'd just be happy with "Sort Artist" order across all genres.

Minimserver appears to have lots of functions for interpreting metadata tags, so I feel I should be able to do this.

My problem is that I have no idea how to get a control app of some kind to display things correctly. I've read through the various bits of documentation showing how to get tags to map to other tags, how to set index/display/sort values, and so on. But what apps are to be used to *interpret* this? So far my attempts with Lightning DS just result in the "Artist" tag being used for the alphabetical list, even though I think I have configured Minimserver otherwise… And Kazoo and Foobar2000 (as a player) just show the file structure.

What apps are people using to take advantage of all of Minimserver's tagging commands?

And why aren't companies that build 6k+ streamers and DACs able to make apps that organize music intuitively? iTunes has had an intuitive Genre > Artist > Album structure (rather than simply Genre > Album) for over a decade. Surely it's not that hard to implement?