Another use for Compilation tag

[jarvis]

Hi,

I recently upgraded to Minimserver2 and I have absolutely no regrets! First the Index Artwork, then this tweak to album sorting for "Various Artists". That means I can have albums sorted by release date for normal artists but by name when viewing compilations!

The tweak above got me thinking about more uses for the tag update file and something I'd been wanting for a while: How to add random tracks to my Linn DS player? There were two options:

• Bubble DS on Android - random tracks feature in Library view
• Linn Kazoo (control point) + Linn Davaar 80+ firmware - Make a "Pin" of a genre and set it to random.
  (Davaar 80 introduces Pins for music servers other than Linn Kazoo Server. These pinned items can be accessed through Kazoo or by pressing+holding buttons 1-6 on the remote control)
  

Both of those work fine, but my main bugbear was that I have a lot of "DJ Mix" albums and the random selection would always include several tracks from these. It's very jarring to listen to those in a random order along with other tracks! If only I could automatically exclude certain tracks? I could create a new genre of "Mixed", but some of the mixes are Trance, others are House, etc. And FLAC files don't support multiple values per tag (e.g. Trance, Mixed). EDIT: They do support it, but it would mean setting Genre="Unmixed" on every new music acquisition.

I'm happy with all my compilations tagged with Album Artist=Various Artists, so I don't need the boolean "Compilation" tag for it's intended purpose. Therefore, I decided to use it to mean "Mixed" instead. So far so good, but Linn don't allow that tag to be Pinned.

The next step was to make both "Mixed" and "Unmixed" appear as an additional genre on all tracks:

I used this TagUpdate file:

Code:

@#AUDIOFORMAT=FLAC
@#AUDIOFORMAT=MP3
@#AUDIOFORMAT=MP4
+UNMIXEDTRACK=1

@UNMIXEDTRACK=1
&COMPILATION=1
-UNMIXEDTRACK
+GENRE=Mixed
&UNMIXEDTRACK=1
+GENRE=Unmixed

It sets a custom tag called UNMIXEDTRACK to "1" for every track. Then for every track that now has that new tag but also has COMPILATION = "1", it removes the custom tag and adds the genre "Mixed". For the other tracks it adds the genre "Unmixed". This relies on the fact that the tagupdate file seems to process each section and filter group in turn, taking into account changes already made.

In MinimServer2 settings I had to add Compilation to ItemTags (obvious) but also #AudioFormat; not so obvious as it is a special tag - that threw me for a while!

So now, I can use Kazoo to pin the new genre of "Unmixed", set it to random and enjoy listening to tracks I've forgotten about without any mixed tracks spoiling the fun.

There was another unexpected benefit - due to MinimServer's dynamic browsing I could browse first to "Unmixed" and then to "Dance" and pin that. Linn's pin seems to record both genres "Unmixed" + "Dance", so I can have random dance tracks without the mixed ones too!

Sorry this solution is a bit specific to Linn owners but it might be useful in other ways.

J