App displays no Artist

[JohnT]

Re. Cambridge Audio android apps.
I’ve just come across this thread not having browsed the forum for a while.

I have a Cambridge Audio CXNv2 streamer with a MinimServer2 library of “classical” music and opera. I am still using the Cambridge Connect app as my control point because the newer Stream Magic app is not fit for (my) purpose. Although it works with UPnP/DNLA servers, it seems to have been designed more for streaming tracks from services such as Tidal and Spotify. As other forum users have posted in this thread, the newer app “edits” some of the metadata and doesn’t display it correctly on the “Playing from Media Library Screen”.

I have designed my own bespoke (i.e. non-standard) tagging regime for my FLAC encoded audio files for searching the library and use the MinimServer advanced property “tagFormat” to create the strings I want to see displayed in the notional Album, Artist and Title areas on the Cambridge Connect app display. So my Artist tag contains more than just an artist name E.g. :-

Album.displayFormat={$Album^$Date^ [^]}, Artist.displayFormat={$Orchestra^^, $Hon^^ $Conductor$Artist$Chorus}, Group.displayFormat={$Composer^^: $Composition^^$Key^ in ^$Name^ (^)}, Title.displayFormat={$Mvt^^ $Movement}

This works well for me on the Cambridge Connect app. I have tried using the newer Stream Magic app but this doesn’t behave in the same way and seems to apply its own formatting rules. E.g. an Artist tag formatted as “Viviane Hagner (vln)” would be displayed as “Hagner, Viviane (vln)”. With multiple artists, e.g. sending “Kate Hughes (sop), Jane Hill (mez)”, only the first artist would be displayed.

In late July 2020, I raised a support ticket on the Cambridge site and subsequently supplied them with some example DIDL-Lite XML data that was sent to the control point from MinimServer and the corresponding FLAC files from my server. This was then going to be sent to their engineers to investigate. I suggested they create a new option in the app’s settings to display the metadata as sent, i.e. in the same way as the original Cambridge Connect app behaved. I haven’t heard back yet as to whether they will implement a change to the app or not.