Sort by Album Artist

[dav1129]

so using another random editor, I can see that Helium Music manager actually saves the record year as the year and artist. see screenshot. this is the value which Minim server is I think reading and sending to BubbleUPnP as the date value. Weird and no idea what to do as I want to continue using Helium, MinimServer and BubbleUPnP

[dav1129]

As per this reply from the autor of Helium does Minim Server support ID3v2.4?

[simoncn]

(27-09-2019 02:08)dav1129 Wrote:  so using another random editor, I can see that Helium Music manager actually saves the record year as the year and artist. see screenshot. this is the value which Minim server is I think reading and sending to BubbleUPnP as the date value. Weird and no idea what to do as I want to continue using Helium, MinimServer and BubbleUPnP

From this screenshot, I see that the file has no DATE tag but does have a YEAR tag. Can you use Helium to set a DATE tag?

MinimServer has full support for ID3v2.4.

[dav1129]

(27-09-2019 08:30)simoncn Wrote:  

(27-09-2019 02:08)dav1129 Wrote:  so using another random editor, I can see that Helium Music manager actually saves the record year as the year and artist. see screenshot. this is the value which Minim server is I think reading and sending to BubbleUPnP as the date value. Weird and no idea what to do as I want to continue using Helium, MinimServer and BubbleUPnP

From this screenshot, I see that the file has no DATE tag but does have a YEAR tag. Can you use Helium to set a DATE tag?

MinimServer has full support for ID3v2.4.

Actually I can't see a DATE field or value and the YEAR field is always empty after saving a tag using Helium. Not sure about a DATE field in Helium and the YEAR field seems to be the RECORD field in Helium (not sure) but when saved using Helium is always corrupted as either empty or multiple values.....

[dav1129]

(27-09-2019 08:30)simoncn Wrote:  

(27-09-2019 02:08)dav1129 Wrote:  so using another random editor, I can see that Helium Music manager actually saves the record year as the year and artist. see screenshot. this is the value which Minim server is I think reading and sending to BubbleUPnP as the date value. Weird and no idea what to do as I want to continue using Helium, MinimServer and BubbleUPnP

From this screenshot, I see that the file has no DATE tag but does have a YEAR tag. Can you use Helium to set a DATE tag?

MinimServer has full support for ID3v2.4.

Is it perhaps something I can customise as in the attached screenshot?

[timster]

I think in indexTags you can put Date:Year

[simoncn]

I downloaded Helium to try this and it appears that it shows the tagged DATE value as Rec. Year. This should work OK with the default MinimServer settings.

[dav1129]

(28-09-2019 08:45)simoncn Wrote:  I downloaded Helium to try this and it appears that it shows the tagged DATE value as Rec. Year. This should work OK with the default MinimServer settings.

It doesn't.

I experimented. With a value for both REL and REC year, the tracks and album show as Unknown when sorted by date.

To cross check I downloaded a random editor called TagScanner (not as flash as Helium but works quote well) and those same files showed no value in the YEAR field.

Next I saved a random value in the YEAR field using TagScanner and those files and album then sorted correctly in Minim Server after a Rescan

When I then checked back in Helium yes, that random year showed under REC YEAR.

But for some reason files tagged using HELIUM with REC YEAR show as YEAR unknown when sorted by DATE.

This is the last email replay from HELIUM's author which is a bit too technical for me until perhaps such time as I have time to try as and decipher it.

Hi David,

Thanks for sharing the files.
I have analysed them both using Helium and a Hex-editor and I found out the following:

1) The file that MinimServer could read year for had the following tags:
-ID3v2.3 with a TYER field and a TDRL field (TDRL = ID3v2.4 recommended field, TYER = obsolete)
-ID3v1.0 without year set
​
2) The file that MinimServer not could read tags for had the following tags:
-ID3v2.4 with a TYER field and a TDRL field
-ID3v1.0 with year set

This leads me to the following conclusion that MinimServer most likely:
1) Does not read ID3v2.4 tags
2) Does not fallback to ID3v1.0 (which is really odd)

What you can try in Helium is what I earlier described, enabling saving of ID3v2 tags as ID3v2.3 from Tools > Options > General (Save ID3v2.x tags as version 2.3)
Using ID3v2.3 will prevent you from using certain fields when tagging, so my best recommendation is that you take contact with the developers of MinimServer and present the above information for them and ask them:
1) If they support only "pure" ID3v2.3
2) Why not ID3v1 is used as a fallback when populated.

[dav1129]

Actually I remembered I tried his suggestion and it still didn't work for me. The DATE or YEAR field is unknown when sorting by DATE.

By the way when I edit the file using Helium but actually change nothing and save those files, those files and album revert again to sorting as DATE or YEAR known. Weird.

Unless I figure it out, I guess I can stick with TagScanner.

[simoncn]

Thanks for posting the response from the author of Helium and thanks for all your work on trying to resolve this incompatibility between Helium and MinimServer.

MinimServer does not read ID3v1 tags. This format is obsolete and was superseded by ID3v2 about 20 years ago. MinimServer has full support for ID3v2.2, ID3v2.3 and ID3v2.4 tags.

If a file is in ID3v2.4 format and has a correctly formatted ID3v2.4 TDRL frame, MinimServer reads the date correctly from the TDRL frame.

The author of Helium mentioned a file 2) that MinimServer could not read. Please upload this file to my FTP server so that I can look at it and see what is causing the problem. I will PM you the server details. Many thanks.