New to Minimserver - a few questions

[winxi]

(14-07-2013 16:14)simoncn Wrote:  It seems that my original reply didn't address the OP's request to be able to use a predefined browsing path.

I had some requests for this in the early days of MinimServer, specifically for the case of Artist/Album browsing, which takes one more click with MinimServer than with some other servers (Artist -> artist name -> Album -> album name instead of Artist/Album -> artist name -> album name).

I think this could be added fairly easily by extending indexTags to allow browsing paths as well as single index entries. For example, if indexTags contains the value Artist/Album, this would add the above Artist/Album "quick select" path alongside other index entries.

This is fairly simple to understand and not too difficult to implement, but it doesn't fully satisfy the OP's request, for two reasons:

1) The request is for a longer path: Composer/Genre/Work Title/ArtistWithYear (sorry, but I don't quite understand how the Grouping custom tag comes into play). This longer path would be cumbersome to display in a control point with limited screen size, so some kind of aliasing capability would be needed, such as Classical={Composer/Genre/Work Title/ArtistWithYear}.

This is an interesting idea and would be surely useful in some situations. For reasons of consistency with the other aliasing capabilities which are already implemented, it may be better to use {Composer/Genre/Work Title/ArtistWithYear}:Classical instead of Classical={Composer/Genre/Work Title/ArtistWithYear}.
In this context I would like to suggest again that it would be great to have the ability to move/rename/remove the 'All albums', 'All items', 'All playlists', 'Untagged items' and 'Folder view' selection choices in the browsing tree, too. From the users point of view it is not easily comprehensible why these shouldn't be treated like the regular index tag choices. Maybe they could be added to the special index tags with e.g. #AllAlbums, #AllItems, ...

Quote:2) ArtistWithYear is a combination of values from two different tags (Artist and Date), so this would need an enhancement to the tagFormat property to allow combination index tags to be defined. For example, this combination could be specified as ArtistWithYear.indexFormat={$artist^$date.index^, } together with the tagOptions setting Date.indexValue.yearOnly. This seems like a significant increase in complexity.

This sounds quite interesting, too. However, I agree that this would be way too complicated to set up for most of the users.

Quote:Given that something like this is possible, the question is whether the reduction in the number of browsing steps would be worth the extra complexity of adding these new mechanisms. Another question is whether the work needed to support this should take priority over other requested enhancements such as UPnP search, a "recently added" playlist, and automatic rescanning for newly added music. I would welcome any feedback on this.

My greatest which for possible future enhancements is UPnP search for various reasons. I think that MinimServer in its current state is already a really sophisticated software, I consider all the other mentioned features just as 'nice to have', but not as essential as UPnP search.