Search or Browse Folder View

[tommyrot]

(10-01-2023 11:28)simoncn Wrote:  Happy New Year!

MinimServer allows you to browse by any tags in any order. With your Beethoven example of browsing by folder, if your files and your indexTags setting include Composer, Work, Conductor, Orchestra and Year, you can browse from the top level by selecting Composer > Work > Conductor > Orchestra > Year and see exactly the albums that you want, just as you do at present.

In addition, you have the option to browse by these tags in a different order if you wish. Perhaps you would like to see all albums in your library with a certain combination of Conductor and Orchestra. Just browse by Conductor > Orchestra to see these. You could also extend your tagging to add soloists without needing to reorganise your folder structure, and make two selections to view all Schubert works with a particular soloist (for example).

At every stage, you are presented with lists of all albums/items in your current selection and a list of index choices for further refinement. It provides everything that folder browsing provides and much more, and is especially suited to a library like yours.

Thanks for your reply, Simon. I appreciate that, theoretically, with consistent tagging, one might be able to browse the index in a nested pattern Composer > Work > Conductor > Orchestra > Year, but I'm afraid this is where theory gets a flat tyre because reality rears its ugly head.

Let's overlook the glaring truth that when you buy music, Work is hardly ever pre-tagged. Even in a perfectly tagged collection, tapping on Composer would present all the composers across your entire collection. This list includes all jazz, rock, pop, blues music which have composers tagged. If your control point alphabetises this and you jump to 'B', that's still a long list and too unwieldy to be practical. You're already lost.

Add another dose of reality. Imagine you decide to pan for gold and you scroll past all the unwanted "B's". Given the wildly different and imperfect tagging practices used down the years, the number of possible Beethovens (in my collection) looks something like this:

Beethoven
Beethoven Ludwig Van
Beethoven Ludvig Van
Beethoven, Ludwig Van
Beethoven, Ludvig Van
Ludwig Van Beethoven
Ludvig Van Beethoven
Beethoven [Wilhelm Furtwangler, Berliner Philharmoniker, 1953], Beethoven Ludwig Van
Beethoven [Wilhelm Furtwängler, Berliner Philharmoniker, 1953], Beethoven Ludwig Van
Beethoven Ludwig Van, [Pablo Casals, The Marlboro Festival Orchestra, 1963], Beethoven, Ludwig Van
... [there are plenty more, but I'll stop here for the sake of brevity.]

Just accounting for poor tagging practice (of adding other data into the composer tag) and European characters, never mind the typos, there are far too many variants of Beethoven for these results to be practical. So, this quest fails after the first tap on Composer. I don't even get to the next stage to select the Work.

I know this reflects on the state of metadata in the library, but it also points to the unending and thankless labour required to preen, weed and sanitise classical music just to be able to find our music. With a music collection in nested folders, music from any source, however badly tagged, can be easily stored and browsed. When storing it, for example, one can ignore variations that wreck your experience searching or browsing-by-tags. For example, variations in spelling and convention e.g. Symphonie/Symphony/Symph or Piano Concerto/piano concerten are all the same – saved together. Other subtle distinctions are also ignored e.g. Furtwangler or Furtwäengler. When I compare the effort-to-reward balance, the level of vigilance required to constantly equalise this in musical metadata feels (to me) like a fool's errand.