Streamlining the browsing tree & multiple configs

[DavidHB]

It's no part of my purpose to 'persuade' you, because that would imply (arrogantly) that I understand your requirements better than you do yourself. But, as we've clearly both put a fair amount of thought into the way we arrange things, I think that it is useful to compare notes and discuss options. It also happens that we seem to be at a similar stage of ripping our respective collections, and we are encountering somewhat similar problems.

(19-09-2013 15:24)haggis999 Wrote:  This shows the issues I have with a folder view. First of all, I can't see how to emulate your selection of Classical -> Bach. For me, 'Classical' is one of my Genre settings and if I start by making a Genre selection the folder view option disappears.

I'm sorry if this sounds a bit obvious, but the folder view is a function of the way the folders are arranged within your music folder (the folder MinimServer is directed to by its contentDir option). In my case, because (following my 'CD shelf' paradigm), the genres are separately stored, my top level categorisation is into genre folders.

If you look at my first attachment (foobar2000 again), you will see that, within the Classical folder, the next level down is Composer, and then album or album group. I use track names to specify the work, as this works with all the Control Points I have tried.

The second attachment shows my much smaller Pop folder (which is likely to grow as my daughters discover the joys of listening to their music on my Linn DSM!). Here the next level down is Artist, then album and song title, in other words the most widely used arrangement.

The good thing about this view is that it mimics the way that I am used to accessing my collection. You already know the bad news ...

Quote:Secondly, if you focus on the composer John Adams you will see that he appears under 'Adams' in the main folder view tree. All my dedicated Adams albums will appear under that heading (so far, I've only ripped one of them). However, Adams also figures in at least two of my compilation albums as you can see further down the listing. By the time I have ripped my full collection, my Adams recordings are going to be all over the place in folder view.

Quite so. And this is a problem on my CD shelves as well; I often rediscover odd works sitting in compilations or used as a filler when the main work is by another composer. What the problem demonstrates is that no one view is ever going to give us all that we need, and that, when the combination of a Control Point and MinimServer offers us a range of browsing options, it is self-defeating to try to cram too much of our browsing activity into any one view.

There are also several things we can do to alleviate the problem. The first is to make sure that tagging is complete and consistent. This, for me, is a two stage process. Firstly, I use dBPoweramp to rip my CDs, in part because it has excellent facilities for retrieving metadata from the internet and then for correcting and amplifying it as necessary. The second stage is to use MP3Tag to make corrections, and ensure the data is consistent. Using MP3Tag's facilities for looking at many folders at once, and for filtering a view by metadata values, makes the job quick and easy. For instance, it takes me less than two minutes to ensure that all files which have 'Beethoven' in the Composer field have that field set to 'Ludwig van Beethoven', so that all the Beethoven files will appear under the same head in a Composer-based view.

The second approach is sometimes to split the ripping of a single CD into two or more albums in the digital collection. You get plenty of classical CDs that contain two or more disparate works by different composers and of pretty much equal 'weight'. It is a real pain to know where to file those CDs on the shelf, and that is a hint that, in the digital collection, you should not necessarily keep the individual works together.

That said, there are some traditional couplings (the Grieg and Schumann Piano Concertos, and the Mendelssohn and Bruch No. 1 Violin Concertos are examples) where one might want to maintain the integrity of the album. In my folder structure, I put those albums in '_Recitals' (the underscore keeps the folder at the top of the list). The difference between '_Recitals' and '_Compilations' is that the former contains performances by one artist (or one group of artists), and so is typically accessed via the 'Artist' view, and the latter has works by multiple composers performed by multiple artists and so would normally be accessed via the album title.

The third palliative for the problem you described is that, from and level in the folder view, MinimServer enables you to switch to a filtered tag view. So, if I know that there are Handel tracks in my somewhere among the classical recitals I can go [folder view] -> Classical -> _Recitals ->> Tag View -> Recitals -> Composer to find them. That looks like a lot of steps, but it's done in a few seconds in Kinsky on my tablet.

What all this detail is about is the way in which folder navigation and indexing can work together powerfully (as I said in my last post) to give us options that no physical arrangement of media can match. In particular, I can start off in my familiar folder structure and use it to filter the index I then might need to get to the destination. For me, this puts my music collection in a whole new light. Just like listening to it through the Akurate DSM, actually ...

(That) David (, again)