Question & Feature request: Best method for browsing multi-disc albums

[simoncn]

(13-01-2013 20:34)Wammer Wrote:  As part of my major retagging exercise I have been making extensive use of MinimServer's ability to display multi-disc albums as single albums. It is a great feature which makes browsing much easier, and it works really well for single-genre sets - opera, concertos, symphonies, etc. - that make up the majority of my multi-disc sets.

However, I have a problem with multi-disc sets that use more than one genre. For example, I have an 8-disc set of Bach compositions that contains a mixture of concertos, orchestral, and chamber works. In this instance I used the "Album [Disc n]" format, but I experienced similar problems on another multi-genre set using just a common album title without the [Disc n] suffix.

The problem is that my control points (Kinsky, Songbook Lite, and PlugPlayer) all display multiple instances of the album. In Composer view, the eight discs appear as four separate "albums" - and I can discern no logic in how the tracks are split between each. In Genre view Concertos and Orchestral each display two "albums" which (coincidentally or otherwise) seem to reflect the disks they reside on, but Chamber displays three "albums" with no discernible logic.

Am I doing something wrong, or is this a bug?

I've tried this, and everything is working as I would expect. I tagged a multi-disc album with a single Composer value and a mixture of different Genre values. If I select by the album's Composer, I see the complete album with all its discs. If I select by one of the Genre values, I see a list of tracks matching that specific genre (taken from different discs), together with a '>> Complete Album' selection that lets me see the complete multi-disc album.

Can you give exact details of how you've tagged one of the problem albums? Please also post a screenshot of what you're seeing in Kinsky.

[Wammer]

(13-01-2013 21:32)simoncn Wrote:  

(13-01-2013 20:34)Wammer Wrote:  As part of my major retagging exercise I have been making extensive use of MinimServer's ability to display multi-disc albums as single albums. It is a great feature which makes browsing much easier, and it works really well for single-genre sets - opera, concertos, symphonies, etc. - that make up the majority of my multi-disc sets.

However, I have a problem with multi-disc sets that use more than one genre. For example, I have an 8-disc set of Bach compositions that contains a mixture of concertos, orchestral, and chamber works. In this instance I used the "Album [Disc n]" format, but I experienced similar problems on another multi-genre set using just a common album title without the [Disc n] suffix.

The problem is that my control points (Kinsky, Songbook Lite, and PlugPlayer) all display multiple instances of the album. In Composer view, the eight discs appear as four separate "albums" - and I can discern no logic in how the tracks are split between each. In Genre view Concertos and Orchestral each display two "albums" which (coincidentally or otherwise) seem to reflect the disks they reside on, but Chamber displays three "albums" with no discernible logic.

Am I doing something wrong, or is this a bug?

I've tried this, and everything is working as I would expect. I tagged a multi-disc album with a single Composer value and a mixture of different Genre values. If I select by the album's Composer, I see the complete album with all its discs. If I select by one of the Genre values, I see a list of tracks matching that specific genre (taken from different discs), together with a '>> Complete Album' selection that lets me see the complete multi-disc album.

Can you give exact details of how you've tagged one of the problem albums? Please also post a screenshot of what you're seeing in Kinsky.

Simon

You were right, it was a tagging problem. Both the offending albums had varying Artist entries and AlbumArtist was blank, and your User Guide says that one of those fields has to be consistent for MinimServer to display a multi-disc album as one album. I entered a value for AlbumArtist and now both albums are displaying correctly.

The multiple genres issue seems to have been a red herring, and I jumped to the wrong conclusion. It seems to have been a coincidence that all the multi-disc albums I had retagged up to that point were from genres - principally operas and oratorios - that have just one Artist entry (albeit multiple artists) so it didn't matter if AlbumArtist was blank.

Thanks again for your help.

Wammer.