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[simoncn]

(16-05-2013 15:38)hvaleton Wrote:  Hello Simon,

Thanks for all your answers and the time you put into this. You've given me a lot to think about and I've been experimenting into the wee small hours, yesterday.

I did start with the Group tag as you suggested. Normally I do all my tagging using MediaMonkey, but MM does not ssem to support the creation or edtiting of custom tags, other than "Custom 1", "Custom 2", etc. Maybe I'm overlooking something but I can't get MM to change these into "Group", or "Composition", etc. (Suggestions for MM, anyone?)

As a workaround, you could use aliasTags in MinimServer to make this change.

Quote:Then I tried Mp3tag (rather unfamiliar to me, but I'm learning to use it now) and with this tool I succeeded in creating the Group tag in a number of test files. In it I put the same info I normally put in 'Album', and I changed 'Album' for all files within the same folder/directory to the name of its directory.
So, Album = Vioolconcerten (Ibragimova), and
tracks 1-3: Group = Mendelssohn - Vioolconcert in e, Op.64 (Ibragimova, OAE, Jurowski)
track 4: Group = Mendelssohn - Ouverture 'De Hebriden' ('Fingal's Cave'), Op.26 (OAE, Jurowski)
Tracks 5-7: Group = Mendelssohn - Vioolconcert in d (Ibragimova, OAE, Jurowski)
This worked fine, as you predicted.
In Sonos, however, Album is a very important source of information, since the on screen info is scarce and there's little room it, so you need to wait for the various fields to start scrolling one after the other... A real nightmare, actually. Sonos has definitely not been designed for classical music! But I'm digressing here.

After making the aforementioned changes to my test files, showed:
Title: Op.64: 1 Allegro molto appassionato
Artists: Alina Ibragimova (viool), Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, Vladimir Jurowski
Album: Mendelssohn - Vioolconcerten (Ibragimova)

Is this what you are seeing on the Sonos Now Playing display? This isn't what I would expect. Are you using MinimServer 0.72? This should be sending the following information to the control point:

Title: Op.64: 1 Allegro molto appassionato
Artists: Alina Ibragimova (viool), Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, Vladimir Jurowski
Album: Mendelssohn - Vioolconcert in e, Op.64 (Ibragimova, OAE, Jurowski)

Because the track is part of a group, the Album information for the track is taken from the Group tag, not the Album tag. This is a change from the 0.71 release onwards.

It's possible that the Sonos is overriding this track information sent by MinimServer and using Album information that was sent to the control point in previous browsing steps. To confirm whether this is happening, please try playing the same track using a different control point such as Kinsky and let me know what it shows on the Now Playing screen.

Quote:As you can see some information is lacking here. I can guess from the prefix of the title, "Op.64: " that Mendelssohns famous violin concerto in E minor is being played, but in other cases this would not be so easy. There are many cases in which the composer of the track that's being played is not in the Album tag. There is no Composer field in any of the Sonos access points (Sonos CR-100 controller, Sonos Ipad app, Sonos Android app, Sonos for Windows).
Take for instance the fourth track in my example: it's an overture and (so) is not named in the Album tag.
All in all, I think it's clear why I would try and hold on to my original way of Album tagging, for the sake of Sonos.

Yes, I understand why you need this "composition" information to be included by the Sonos as part of the Album information.

Quote:Then a brilliant idea came up
What if I put the Folder/Directory name in a new custom tag named AlbumMinim and put "AlbumMinim:Album" in the aliasTags setting?
This way I would not have to change the text of my Album tags and MinimServer would treat AlbumMinim as Album to get the correct order of tracks in Folder View.
I tried this but it did not work out, unfortunately. The track order was still the same as when I started:

Mendelssohn - Ouverture 'De Hebriden' ('Fingal's Cave'), Op.26 (OAE, Jurowski)
Mendelssohn - Vioolconcert in d (Ibragimova, OAE, Jurowski)
Mendelssohn - Vioolconcert in e, Op.64 (Ibragimova, OAE, Jurowski)

(N.B. I've given the Group titles here, since the grouping still works.)

In my desperation I've also added both AlbumMinim and Album to the list of indexTags, but this did not change the sorting behaviour.
Is there someting I don't understand about the alias function? Or is Album treated differently from all the other tags?
I have succesfully tried aliasing Composer to Componist.

The problem you're seeing is caused by having two Album tag values for each track: the original Album value and the AlbumMinim value. In this case, MinimServer will ignore the second conflicting value (from AlbumMinim:Album) and will write a warning message to the log. It's always worth checking the log to see if there are any error or warning messages.

You would need to add another alias Album:nil to get what you're expecting. However, this would presumably take you back to the previous situation with the AlbumMinim tag value being shown by the Sonos as the album value.