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Cableguy · 15-03-2012, 13:19

Simon,
First of all, a HUGE thank you for your great work with MinimServer! You share a lot of your time, knowledge and skills when making this happen, and you contribute a lot to the music loving community!

Now a few questions / requests.

1. Initial letters – I have a big album collection (around 3500 albums) and it would be good in that situation to be able to choose Artist/Album Artist/All Artists by their initial letter. Would it be possible to make that optional?

2. Compilations / Various Artists – If understand it correctly, MinimServer lists such albums under each contributing artist? It would be great if it (maybe optionally) was possible to do like either Twonky or Asset does it (i.e. Twonky lets you specify a location where all located albums are presented to the control point under Various, and Asset uses the COMPILATION tag set to =1)

3. Albums by Artist sorting – by this I mean (and this would be like a dream feature to me, as it would make the browsing more like looking in the CD shelf!) that you choose eg All Artists (or Album Artist or Artists), and then choose a new sort option “Albums by Artist” which then presents all ALBUMS sorted by the artist.

So if you own four albums (eg AC/DC – Stiff Upper Lip, Beach Boys – Pet Sounds, Beatles – Let It Be and Rolling Stones – Sticky Fingers),

The control point will now show album art for these four albums in the order listed in the brackets above.

This could be enhanced further by letting the user chose Initial Letter as a third step before presenting the albums, and even further (this would be amazingly great if possible!) if shown (after Initial Letter was choosen) sorted by Date!

Do you think this would be possible?

Best regards,
Jens

simoncn · 15-03-2012, 22:44

(15-03-2012 13:19)Cableguy Wrote: Simon,
First of all, a HUGE thank you for your great work with MinimServer! You share a lot of your time, knowledge and skills when making this happen, and you contribute a lot to the music loving community!

Thanks for this. I've enjoyed doing it, and it's been great to have these interactions with fellow music enthusiasts!

Quote:Now a few questions / requests.

1. Initial letters – I have a big album collection (around 3500 albums) and it would be good in that situation to be able to choose Artist/Album Artist/All Artists by their initial letter. Would it be possible to make that optional?

Yes, it's possible. Ideally this could/should be done on the control point side, but it seems that no control points have a good implementation of this currently. Given this, I think I'll need to add it as a server option.

Quote:2. Compilations / Various Artists – If understand it correctly, MinimServer lists such albums under each contributing artist? It would be great if it (maybe optionally) was possible to do like either Twonky or Asset does it (i.e. Twonky lets you specify a location where all located albums are presented to the control point under Various, and Asset uses the COMPILATION tag set to =1)

I think you can get what you need by using the ALBUMARTIST tag on all these compilation albums and searching by the Artist index. If you do this, you won't see any contributing artists. If you ever want to find tracks with a particular contributing artist, you can search by the All Artists index.

Quote:3. Albums by Artist sorting – by this I mean (and this would be like a dream feature to me, as it would make the browsing more like looking in the CD shelf!) that you choose eg All Artists (or Album Artist or Artists), and then choose a new sort option “Albums by Artist” which then presents all ALBUMS sorted by the artist.

So if you own four albums (eg AC/DC – Stiff Upper Lip, Beach Boys – Pet Sounds, Beatles – Let It Be and Rolling Stones – Sticky Fingers),

The control point will now show album art for these four albums in the order listed in the brackets above.

You can do this already by using the Properties dialog to set the albumSortTags property to Artist, then selecting the "xxxx Albums" choice from the home container.

Quote:This could be enhanced further by letting the user chose Initial Letter as a third step before presenting the albums, and even further (this would be amazingly great if possible!) if shown (after Initial Letter was choosen) sorted by Date!

Do you think this would be possible?

The frst of these would be possible when Initial Letter is supported. For the second of these, if I understand your request correctly, you can already do it by setting the albumSortTags property to Artist, Date. This will show the albums in artist order, and will sort any albums with the same artist by reverse date order.

Cableguy · 16-03-2012, 11:56

(15-03-2012 22:44)simoncn Wrote: I think you can get what you need by using the ALBUMARTIST tag on all these compilation albums and searching by the Artist index. If you do this, you won't see any contributing artists. If you ever want to find tracks with a particular contributing artist, you can search by the All Artists index.

Simon,
Thanks for your detailed response!

Regarding the quote above - Do I set the ALBUMARTIST tag to the respective artist and the ARTIST tag to Various? Or some other way? Where do I browse to the compilations - will they show under Various or something simliar?
Sorry if I'm missing something obvious!

simoncn · 16-03-2012, 12:44

(16-03-2012 11:56)Cableguy Wrote:
(15-03-2012 22:44)simoncn Wrote: I think you can get what you need by using the ALBUMARTIST tag on all these compilation albums and searching by the Artist index. If you do this, you won't see any contributing artists. If you ever want to find tracks with a particular contributing artist, you can search by the All Artists index.

Simon,
Thanks for your detailed response!

Regarding the quote above - Do I set the ALBUMARTIST tag to the respective artist and the ARTIST tag to Various? Or some other way? Where do I browse to the compilations - will they show under Various or something simliar?
Sorry if I'm missing something obvious!

Sorry that this wasn't clear. I'd been thinking of sending a follow-up post, but you beat me to it!

You should set ALBUMARTIST to Various, and you should set ARTIST to the actual artist name(s). If a track has more than one artist, you can set multiple ARTIST tags on the track. The ALBUMARTIST value must be the same for all tracks in the album, but the ARTIST values can be different for each track if the tracks are by different artists.

After doing this, in the Artist index you'll see all your compilations under an entry named "Various". You won't see any of the track ARTIST values in the Artist index.

If you want to see the track artists, you can use the All Artists index. The track ARTIST values will appear in this index, and you won't see a "Various" entry. If a track has multiple ARTIST values, each artist will be listed separately in the All Artists index, and the track will appear underneath each of the artists for that track.

Does this seem like what you're looking for?

gateKeeper · 08-12-2014, 10:13

Hi Simon,
first of all, thank you Very much for your hard work. Minimserver is the best server I ever found for music. Since I bought WD MyCloud + Pioneer N-50 I has been trying many different
servers, but Minim giave me almost all what I wanted that time.
But, time is like a river, my musical collection grows fast and now navigating thru the collection using the endpoint abilities becomes a headache.
The number of Artists is very big, so even I know what I want to lister to, I have to spent sufficient time to find it on N-50 display. There are abilities to use
ipod/iphone + Pioneer dedicated SW to navigate thru the library, it helps, the problem is that I don't own such devices)) So, I remember that I successfully used such
feature as Jens described above (#1) with other media servers. This feature simplifies of finding an Artist inside collection very much.
So, can you please give me a hope of implementing it in Minimserver? Or maybe I missed something and the feature already in place?

I see I can explain something wrong because English is not my native language, so, what I'm looking for is to have Artists combined by the fisrt letter, like below in Minimserver:

[Artists] -
|- [ABC]
|- [DEF]
|- [GHI]

and so on

=Dmitry=

simoncn · 08-12-2014, 12:46

(08-12-2014 10:13)gateKeeper Wrote: Hi Simon,
first of all, thank you Very much for your hard work. Minimserver is the best server I ever found for music. Since I bought WD MyCloud + Pioneer N-50 I has been trying many different
servers, but Minim giave me almost all what I wanted that time.
But, time is like a river, my musical collection grows fast and now navigating thru the collection using the endpoint abilities becomes a headache.
The number of Artists is very big, so even I know what I want to lister to, I have to spent sufficient time to find it on N-50 display. There are abilities to use
ipod/iphone + Pioneer dedicated SW to navigate thru the library, it helps, the problem is that I don't own such devices)) So, I remember that I successfully used such
feature as Jens described above (#1) with other media servers. This feature simplifies of finding an Artist inside collection very much.
So, can you please give me a hope of implementing it in Minimserver? Or maybe I missed something and the feature already in place?

I see I can explain something wrong because English is not my native language, so, what I'm looking for is to have Artists combined by the fisrt letter, like below in Minimserver:

[Artists] -
|- [ABC]
|- [DEF]
|- [GHI]

and so on

=Dmitry=

This thread is very old (the previous post was from March 2012) and MinimServer has moved forward a lot since then. To browse by initial letter, you can set the alphaGroup property. See this section for details.

gateKeeper · 08-12-2014, 13:52

(08-12-2014 12:46)simoncn Wrote: This thread is very old (the previous post was from March 2012) and MinimServer has moved forward a lot since then. To browse by initial letter, you can set the alphaGroup property. See this section for details.

))) Having so many configurable options for different purposes is a great advantage of Minim. Haven't reviewed all of them yet, that's why I've been asking it. Thank you so much, I'll try this out once back home today!

=Dmitry=