New to Minimserver - a few questions

[Oliviander]

(14-07-2013 16:14)simoncn Wrote:  It seems that my original reply didn't address the OP's request to be able to use a predefined browsing path.

I had some requests for this in the early days of MinimServer, specifically for the case of Artist/Album browsing, which takes one more click with MinimServer than with some other servers (Artist -> artist name -> Album -> album name instead of Artist/Album -> artist name -> album name).

I think this could be added fairly easily by extending indexTags to allow browsing paths as well as single index entries. For example, if indexTags contains the value Artist/Album, this would add the above Artist/Album "quick select" path alongside other index entries.

This is fairly simple to understand and not too difficult to implement, but it doesn't fully satisfy the OP's request, for two reasons:

1) The request is for a longer path: Composer/Genre/Work Title/ArtistWithYear (sorry, but I don't quite understand how the Grouping custom tag comes into play). This longer path would be cumbersome to display in a control point with limited screen size, so some kind of aliasing capability would be needed, such as Classical={Composer/Genre/Work Title/ArtistWithYear}.

2) ArtistWithYear is a combination of values from two different tags (Artist and Date), so this would need an enhancement to the tagFormat property to allow combination index tags to be defined. For example, this combination could be specified as ArtistWithYear.indexFormat={$artist^$date.index^, } together with the tagOptions setting Date.indexValue.yearOnly. This seems like a significant increase in complexity.

Given that something like this is possible, the question is whether the reduction in the number of browsing steps would be worth the extra complexity of adding these new mechanisms. Another question is whether the work needed to support this should take priority over other requested enhancements such as UPnP search, a "recently added" playlist, and automatic rescanning for newly added music. I would welcome any feedback on this.

Hi Simon,
after having ripped all of my SACDs I am back to play around with MinS.
After looking up the indexFormat property in the user guide it
left me puzzled. So i searched the forum and landed here.
So my question is this feature actually implemented by now ?
And how does it work exactly ?
Or is it just a proposal as there is nothing useful in the manual.

And that reminds me of reminding you of your promise you mad in
https://forum.minimserver.com/showthread.php?tid=1162
Thanks very much for your thoughtful comments and observations. I will not attempt to continue the discussion here. Instead, when the next release is out, I will revisit the documentation sections relating to the points you have raised and I will do my best to provide better explanations and clearer terminology for everything that you have listed as being baffling. This feedback is extremely useful, and I am very grateful that you have taken the time to provide it.

And with that I would very much appreciate an introduction to the logical structure of MinS and more examples:
For instance I have no idea what
TagOptions: Date.indexValue.yearOnly
actually does because that what the description says
is exactly the behaviour that I would expect
as default.
It would be very helpful if you added to all examples
in the manual
not only how to use it but actually explain the effect
by comparing:
How does it work with the option and how without.

Btw
THX for the great MinS