multidisc albums, DISCSUBTITLE and GROUP tags: conflictual ?

[simoncn]

(20-10-2013 22:39)Andre Gosselin Wrote:  Simon,
The album does have a "Symphony No. 4" group which spans muliple discs (disc 1, tracks 5-6, and disc 2, tracks 1-2). The log file indicates :
"Sun Oct 20 13:24:15 Error: group spans multiple discs: Symphony No. 4"

Reading in your post that a group spanning multiple discs is not supported makes me feel sad, since the need for such groups is not a rare occurence at all. The 6-disc album in question shows 3 cases where a group needs to span multiple discs. Such a prohibition would, if fully enforced, somewhat hampers the usefullness of the group concept, and I would hesitate spending the time needed to do the tagging if some groups cannot be defined. However, as I mentioned in my original post, groups appear to work OK if DISCSUBTITLES tags are removed, irrespective of the fact that they span multiple discs or not (track numbers are changed because of merging, but at least groups are functional). So it appears that this prohibition can be lifted under some circumstances.

I hope that this problem can be solved.

Regards

A group can't span unmerged discs because a group is a containment structure and an unmerged disc is also a containment structure. You can see this containment hierarchy of Album > Disc > Group when browsing in a control point. When you merge the discs of an album, you are removing the discs from the album's containment hierarchy, leaving only the containment hierarchy Album > Group.

For solving this, one option is to merge the album discs, as you have discovered. Another option is to create another tag such as Composition or Work that you can use in place of Group to handle such cases. This Composition or Work tag doesn't create a containment structure, so there are no restrictions on how it can be used. You can then browse the index by Composition or Work to find and play any musical work that consists of multiple tracks, whether or not it is part of a group.

The crash that you reported will be fixed in the next release of MinimServer. In such cases, MinimServer will produce an error message and will show the tracks as ungrouped instead of crashing. Thank you for letting me know about this.