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

[DavidHB]

Thank you for another quick and helpful reply. After tomorrow, perhaps I will have something to distract me from bothering you again in short order ...

(09-09-2013 19:46)simoncn Wrote:  I agree that doing this from my end of the telescope would require an extra tagging step for users who want to sort by last name. Ideally, there would be a tool of some kind (not part of MinimServer) that would take care of this tagging step in a user-friendly and intuitive fashion. What I've proposed should be regarded as a simple starting point for an initial implementation of custom sorting, not a final and complete solution.

That said, it seems to me to be a pretty good starting point. Unless and until your user-friendly tool becomes available, I suggest that the excellent MinimServer documentation should contain a step by step guide to the tagging step. I'd be happy to provide input on MP3Tag (on which I am no expert, but which I have made work for me). Actually my major criticism of MP3Tag is that the documentation does not include step-by-step guides on performing particular tasks. It is hardly fair to expect new users to read through a welter of forum posts just to get into the program. By contrast, the MinimServer documentation provides all the necessary hand-holding for new users without treating them as idiots.

Quote:The <n> albums list is not an index (in terms of how MinimServer treats indexes), but is a flat list of the albums with no further index selections possible. The only customizations possible are sort order (using a fixed list of tags) and alphabetical grouping (by the first letter of the album title) ... The code that implements alphabetical grouping is quite complex and is used for all alphabetically grouped lists, and I wouldn't want to attempt to tweak this code to do something different for the special case of "<n> albums".

Ah. This is the sort of guidance that only the programmer can provide. I clearly need to find the best way of accessing my music, and maybe the folder view is the most useful default for me. This is what is so good about MinimServer providing options.

A sorted list of albums per se is of limited use to me, because I like to normalise my data as far as possible. My preferred title is "Symphonies 1 and 2" rather than "Beethoven: Symphonies 1 and 2". As previously noted, how well this will work will depend on Control Point behaviour. I'm not likely to add to my 80 album development library until I am clearer about this.

Quote:I think you could achieve your desired sort order by setting Album.sortTags to something like:

Genre, Composer, AlbumArtist, Album

but this wouldn't be compatible with alphabetical grouping, as you have said.

Including AlbumArtist in Album.SortTags generates an error and a red mimim icon. Is AlbumArtist not a permitted field in Album.sortTags? EDIT: I figured it out; I'd forgotten to put AlbumArtist in IndexTags as well.

Quote:

DavidHB Wrote:UPnPlay on Anrdoid, 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.

I tried this, and I get the normal top-level menu on startup. Have you done some configuration of UPnPlay to make it show the "<n> albums" list instead?

Sorry, sloppy description on my part. Both Control Points (foobar2000/foo_upnp and UPnPlay) first present a list of sources, which in my case include my DNLA server (ReadyDNLA) and MinimServer; foobar2000 offers a tree listing and UPnP give a text list with icons. It's what happens when you select MinimServer that I misleadingly described as 'startup'. UPnPlay goes straight to the '<n> albums' list if you've started it from scratch; if it's running in the background, it remembers the track it's pointing to. I tend to quit UPnPlay when I've finished using it, as I'm not specially fond of Android's propensity to hold on to large numbers of applications in the background.

Quote:

DavidHB Wrote: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.

I think this would be a step too far in complexity for the "<n> albums" list, which is intended to be a simple list. The MinimServer indexes are intended to be the place where more complex structuring and selection can be done.

This is a perhaps pity from my point of view, but you know best. It's not as if there are no other options, and it may be that it's my mindset rather than MinimServer that needs to change. I clearly need to experiment a bit more. Thank you for explaining things and giving me some clues as to what I might try.

David