A couple of queries from a Newbie.

[simoncn]

(08-12-2013 23:34)Pastim Wrote:  I have only just discovered MinimServer. What a great piece of software! I got the server installed on my Vortexbox and MinimWatch on my desktop in no time. Most importantly it even supports bespoke tags, which is essential for my classical collection.

Thanks very much!

Quote:I have been trying to avoid UPnP having had grim experiences in the past with various bits of incompatible kit and software. However, MinimServer makes it almost usable as my premier playing method, except for a few puzzles. Forgive me if they have been answered elsewhere already. I have looked.

1. I have multiple renderers. One can process 192Khz flacs/wavs, one can't. Is there any chance the transcoding might in future include 'downgrading' where necessary?

In theory, it is possible for this to be supported. In practice, it would be a lot of work to implement, and I don't think it will happen any time soon. I will add it to the list of requested future enhancements.

Quote:2. I cannot get the multiTag feature to work for Genre or Artist. For Genre and Artist the multiple values are always split (so even if I enter

Code:

-Genre.display.multiTag

they are still split). However, I don't know if this being done by MinimServer or my Controller (leia or foobar2000) and/or Renderers. What am I missing?

What exactly is the problem (split?) that you are trying to solve, and why do you think the multiTag setting is the way to solve it? I suspect you may have misunderstood the intended use of multiTag.

Quote:3. The multiple AlbumArtist issue, which I see has been done to death on these pages, is something of a pain. I currently use Squeezebox (LMS) and foobar2000 as players. Both of these allow me to use the tags I have set up (using puddletag) as below:

- The premier artists on all tracks in the Album: the AlbumArtist
- The premier artists on all tracks (movements) in a (classical) Work (a bespoke tag): the WorkArtist (includes the above)
- All artists on each track: Artist (includes the above)

When searching I use whichever is appropriate to what I want to find, and I do use each of them from time to time.

However, with MinimServer I get:

- errors on the log (as expected) for multiple AlbumArtists x and y
- the multiple AlbumArtist entries are both missing from the AlbumArtist index

The above is as expected.

Quote:- the combined AlbumArtist entries (separated by a comma, as x, y) are present in the Artist index

This should happen for Artist entries, but not for ignored AlbumArtist entires. Perhaps you are seeing this for ignored AlbumArtist entries that are duplicated as Artist entries.

Quote:- the individual entries duplicated in AlbumArtist and Artist are not present in the Artist index

You will find all the individual Artist entries in the All Artists index.

Quote:This combination is very confusing, since I have have lost the individual entries in Artist and the entries in AlbumArtist.

The Artist index entry for an album is the AlbumArtist value if this is present and valid. If there is no valid AlbumArtist, the Artist index value is determined by the Artist.indexValue setting, which defaults to a comma-separated list of Artist values if not specified explicitly.

Quote:Luckily for classical I can fall back on WorkArtist, but the combination of what works and what doesn't is difficult to work with. I appreciate that multiple AlbumArtist tags may give processing headaches, but I was hoping that they might get combined (x, y) just under the AlbumArtist index, and that it would then be possible to treat the combination as one of the items identifying the whole Album. I don't want to give up on my tagging scheme since it works well elsewhere.

Is there another solution?

You can use aliasTags to "rename" your AlbumArtist tags to something else such as MainArtist. There is no problem with having multiple MainArtist values, so this will eliminate the warnings and ignored tags.

You can also rename the MainArtist index back to AlbumArtist for display purposes. This is getting close to what you want.

You can also use the Artist.indexValue setting to customize the value in the Artist index to be a combination of MainArtist and Artist values.

The above settings might not give you exactly what you want, but they should enable you to get closer to this than you are at present.

After the next release is out, I will spend a bit of time thinking about whether this area can be made a bit more flexible and less confusing.