suggestions to customize browsing

[winxi]

Quote:
This is a confusing area, because of the various different uses of Artist / ARTIST / artist:

1) It's a tag value (ARTIST) that can be used one or more times in each file.
2) It's an index value (Artist) with special rules (use ALBUMARTIST tag if available, otherwise merge the values of the ORCHESTRA and CONDUCTOR tags with the values of the ARTIST tags).
3) It's a value (artist) sent by MinimServer to the control point for use when displaying albums or tracks in the browser or the playlist. This value is currently the same as that used for 2).

I presume your question is about 2). I think what's currently there is too complex, and I don't want to make it more complex by adding special treatment of other tags such as PERFORMER. I'm thinking of simplifying it so it works like all the other index fields and displays the same information as 1). For 3), I'd like to make this value more flexible and configurable than it is currently, with the capability to mix in tag values of the user's choice.

With this change, every index would display exactly what's in the corresponding tag, so you could build any kind of custom index that you want. You'd also be able to display these indexes under a name that's different from the name in the tag. For example, you could use PERFORMER as the tag name, and browse all your PERFORMER values using? an index named Artist.

I think this approach would be both simple and flexible.

hi, i've quoted this from the linn forums as introduction, as i think that this would be exactly the most straightfoward and flexible way to handle indizes. now i'm used to the conditional artist indexing, but in the beginning it was quite confusing. i would prefer the containers to show exactly what the corresponding tags contain.
i have a vision to customize browsing the following way: a listbox in minimwatch, where you can add and remove tags arbitrarily and the ability to reorder them. minimserver should show only indizes corresponding to these tags in the right order. for each tag in the listbox the following options:

1) map the tag name to an individual name shown in minimserver (this would handle different languages, etc.)

2) assign a tag for sort order (this would make all discussion of different sort orders obsolet) and specify a list of strings which are ignored by the sorting algorithm (e.g. the, los, las, ...)

3) alphagrouping: not only switch on/off, but additionally an integer number of items when alphagrouping applies. i personally want alphagrouping for containers containing 1000 or more items, but definitely not for just 5 items (when you have narrowed down your selection).

4) option to add the number of items in a container in front of its name.

5) if upnp search is available, enable/disable this container for searching.

as the title suggests, please take this as suggestions, and not as requests - i know that this is quite much. i'm still very happy with the current version of minimserver.

cheers, winxi