The '<n> albums' sort order (again)

[DavidHB]

Simon, thank you for a characteristically complete, helpful and courteous reply. I would have replied sooner, but I was laying the network cable to feed the renderer I hope to buy tomorrow. (And also reading the 35 page thread on the Linn forum about whether network cables make a difference to the sound quality. Entertainingly weird, but pretty irrelevant to me, as most of my network cable is buried in the walls. I eagerly await the discussion as to whether or not a Netgear router produces better sound quality than the standard BT box ...)

(08-09-2013 17:41)simoncn Wrote:  I find that the design of a feature normally changes as part of the experience of implementing that feature and seeing how it feels to use it, so any descriptions of yet-to-be-implemented features are subject to change.

Yes, that's been my experience as a programmer, too. Second thoughts are often better.

Quote:Sometimes things take longer to implement than expected, and I've learned that it's best not to predict timescales for future enhancements because my predictions would inevitably be over-optimistic

Fully understood. The software is already so good that I can be patient.

Quote:With MinimServer, this would be supported by using a multistep index selection of Genre first, then Composer or AlbumArtist, then the desired album. This doesn't match your suggested "bookshelf" model of a single totally ordered sequence of albums.

Actually, I don't think that we're that far apart. When some bit of domestic turbulence causes me to take down all my CDs and store them out of harm's way, they always seem to end up in random order. The initial sort is then into two 'globs' - classical and non-classical. Each is then sub-sorted separately; composer-album for the classical and genre-artist-album for the rest. Those pesky classical recitals and compilations are extracted to form a glob of their own, sorted by artist for the recitals and album for the compilations. This is a multi-step process.

Quote:My thoughts at present are that MinimServer should derive the display name from the sort name, not the other way round. This is because there's no possibility of ambiguity problems when converting

Vaughan Williams, Ralph => Ralph Vaughan Williams
Beethoven, Ludwig van => Ludwig van Beethoven

but the reverse can't be done reliably in any simple way.

Well, we are fully agreed on the nature of the problem, but we are approaching it from opposite ends of the telescope. You quite reasonably want to feed MinimServer data it will not choke on. I am concerned that the data in online databases in is not in that form, so will have to be separately formatted for use with MinimServer; I know that you too want to impose on users as little as possible. For myself, I believe that, using MP3Tag, the workload required to make composer and artist data MinimServer-friendly is entirely manageable. Users who wish to steer clear of filter instructions and regular expressions may think differently. In the end, it's your call.

Quote:I'm hoping to support what you've described, subject to my comments above.

This is good to know.

Quote:Using the multistep index selection approach I have described, this wouldn't present any difficulty because you would select nonclassical albums using Genre > AlbumArtist > album instead of Genre > Composer > album.

Indeed. That works well now in the individual tag-based indexes. In my original post, I did not perhaps make it clear enough that all my suggestions related only to the '<n> albums' index. As I think about it further (a useful product of friendly dialogue), the need for some of what I suggested will depend to some degree on the behaviour of the Control Point.

UPnPlay on Andoid, for example, always shows the '<n> albums' index on startup, and this (if I use software with this behaviour as standard) makes it useful to tune '<n> albums' as closely to my needs as possible. By contrast, foo_upnp on foobar2000 shows no index by default, and its '<n> albums' index is just an alphabetical list of album titles. After tomorrow, my primary Control Point may be Kinsky or Bubble DS. It won't be n-Stream, because I don't do iOS.

Quote:MinimServer allows you to control alphabetical grouping by the tag name and also by the minimum number of list entries to be grouped alphabetically. This would allow you to have the Genre index ungrouped and have the AlbumArtist and Composer indexes grouped.

Indeed; this is what I have. So I suppose I am asking (1) that these options could be applied (if need be, optionally) to the album.Sort option, and (2) that, in album.Sort, the values of any ungrouped tag(s) that are sorted before the grouped tag appear in the '<n> albums' list, as shown in the example in my last post.

Quote:My suggestions above aren't exactly what you have requested. If you want to reproduce the "bookshelf" view exactly, you could do this by browsing using [folder view] and arranging your folder structure and folder names to give you the exact ordering and hierarchy that you want.

I think that your suggestions are pretty close to what I need. And I entirely agree that a properly constructed folder tree is a powerful organisation and search tool. People often seem to think that indexing replaces the folder structure; in my experience (particularly with digital photography, where the number of files can be quite vast), both are essential. With this thought in mind, before starting with network based music, I cleared out my music folder completely, and started again with a folder tree that, as nearly as possible, follows the 'CD shelf' paradigm. Depending on Control Point behaviour (see above), I'd ideally like the '<n> albums' list to do the same, particularly for those occasions when I'm in 'bear with small brain' mode and need to fall back to the more familiar neural path. But, as said, I can wait.

Thank you again.

David