Index Artwork

[DavidHB]

This follows on from an old thread in the now obsolescent MinimServer 2 forum, where the earlier posts give the background. The purpose of this post is to prompt further discussion on and assessment of the indexArtwork feature now that we have had over a year to become familiar with it.

I confess that, following my initial posts, I allowed my experimental artwork setup to languish in my MinimServer test installation (on my PC; I actually listen to music using installations on my NASs), and I did not initially take advantage of the significant improvements Simon made to the feature. But a few months back, I set about producing a better setup, and found it easier than I had expected. My initial enthusiasm about the artwork feature was rekindled when I found that it transformed my user experience of working with my music library. My daughter (never an easy sell when it comes to embracing new technology) was similarly impressed when I showed her the updated UI a day or two ago.

I need to make a small digression here. With UPnP AV/OpenHome systems, the user experience is more the product of the server and control point working together than of either of them individually, though there are clearly aspects of the UI that only one or the other component can control. So my experience is typically of Bubble DS and MinimServer on Android, and Kazoo and MinimServer on Windows. For me, with my mainly classical music collection, the intelligent browsing features of MinimServer are the core of the UI, and, happily, they are the same on both control points.

Of course, intelligent browsing has worked perfectly well since MinimServer was introduced in 2012 without the use of artwork. But, as has long been shown on other products, the use of visual cues makes the whole process of navigating the library smoother and more intuitive. What indexArtwork now provides (to a greater extent, I believe, than any other music server) is a degree of customisation that allows the user to tailor the UI to his or her workflow. And the process is less head-scratching than many other settings in MinimServer.

All of what follows is described in the User Guide, but here for ease of reference is what I did to implement indexArtwork.

• The only settings change I made was to add indexArtwork=all to the serverOptions setting on the Advanced tab of the MinimServer properties window;
• I stored all the bespoke artwork (images for menu entries that do not work particularly well with arbitrarily selected album covers) in a folder named indexArtwork at the top level of my music library, as per the instructions in the User Guide.
• Using normal web search, I set about finding suitable bespoke images. I deliberately chose line drawings, for visual contrast with the album covers, where these are used. Very cleverly, MinimServer recognises the files albums.jpg, items.jpg, [folder view].jpg and [untagged].jpg and associates them with their respective menu entries. The attachment (click to display) gives a general idea of the set of bespoke images I ended up with.
• For the alphabetical selection I use with both Composer and Album, I downloaded a (paid for) font designed for use as initial capitals. This came as a single page, from which I extracted the individual letters, and named them A.jpg, B.jpg and so on.
• a restart of MinimServer (including a rescan) completed the setup process. At that point I had full image artwork display on all my devices.
  

Although the discussion in the old thread does mention performance issues, I have not experienced any problems to speak of, even on my rather basic Huawei tablet. The one small problem I have is that I cannot persuade either Bubble DS or Kazoo to display the top level of the MinimServer menu structure as a grid (which uses the screen real estate much more effectively) rather than as a list. I don't know whether MinimServer has any influence here, though I doubt it.

I'd be very grateful to know about others' experience of the indexArtwork feature, which IMO is the best improvement made to MinimServer since Version 2 was launched.

David