New user - help with directory structure?

[RachFan]

I'm just starting, and just found this forum. I have over 1000 CDs (mostly classical), a Cambridge Audio CXN streamer, and QNAP TS 251+ NAS. I am excited about using MinimServer to search my collection. But I have a lot of questions.

Are there any general intro articles? I found a guide for installing MinimServer 2 on a QNAP NAS. That should get me started. Are there also any pinned articles somewhere with general advice and how to avoid common pitfalls?

My biggest puzzle now is how to structure my files. I have just read that the actual file hierarchy won't matter to MinimServer, which is good news to me. I'm hoping to do things like this with MinimServer: find all copies of the Haydn Trumpet Concerto in my collection, display them with performer & album data, and allow me to select one. I must have half a dozen recordings of that concerto scattered in my collection. MinimServer can do this, right?

But I still would like to structure files so that I can find content on my own, if I have to. I thought I would mirror my physical shelving in the file structure, like so:

+ classical / composer / work / performer / album / tracks...

+ jazz / performer / album

+ piano / performer / album

+ trumpet / performer / album

+ soundtracks / composer / album

+ poprock / performer / album

Would this be a good idea? I just read a post advising against dividing classical/composer by works. But I do like putting all my copies of Bach's WTC together, or all my copies of Rachmaninoff Concertos by different performers shelved together -- for example.

I haven't actually started ripping CDs yet. I think dbPowerAmp and MusicBrainz Picard look like my ticket there...

Thank you!

[lyapounov]

(14-05-2022 21:51)RachFan Wrote:  My biggest puzzle now is how to structure my files. .

I haven't actually started ripping CDs yet. I think dbPowerAmp and MusicBrainz Picard look like my ticket there...

Thank you!

Having currently 8668 albums, I ran into this problem since a long time.

Here is my philosophy, just take whatever you like from it:

1) I don't trust the internal tags. This is a nightmare, particularly in classical.

In other type of music, usually albums have a unique name which you don't find that much elsewhere "dark side of the moon".

In classical, what should be the album name: Symphony n°1 ? But which composer ? Which version ?

Karajan has at least three recording of Beethoven Symphonies. So Album name should be Beethoven - Symphony n° 1 - Karajan 1960 ?
What a nightmare.
Now: the Russian: is it Prokofiev or Prokofieff ? Shostakovich or Chostakovitch ? Other nightmare

2) As I did not find a proper way of tagging, I decided to just not use, and to put everything in the structure.

My structure is :
Level 1:
0) Test and samples
1) Renaissance
2) Baroque
3) Classical
4) Operas
5) XXth Century
6) Jazz
7) Blues, Folk, Soul, Gospel
8) Pop, Rock
9) World music
10) Movies, shows
11) Chansons françaises
12) Contes et autres

Now level 2: it varies so much.
The simple on is jazz: by main artist (from Aaron Shulai to Zsofia Boros) plus _various, _compilation, etc... same with Pop, Rock, Blues, et.

The most complex is Renaissance: by label and by main interpret and by composer and Elisabethan and Gregorian etc.

Baroque and classical: mainly by composer, but also a section by interprets (I decide myself if an album goes under composer or interpret)

Bach and Beethoven have another layer below: piano, symphonies and concerto, chamber, vocal because I have so many of them.

World music: mix of instruments (Oud, percussion), genre (Celtic, Flamenco, ...) and places (Afrique, Iran, Eastern Europe, etc.),

Etc.

In a nutshell, I find the directory structure much more appealing than the tags. But this is about me...

And yes bravo to Simon to offer us this possibility !

[simoncn]

In order for the OP to do what he wants:

Quote:find all copies of the Haydn Trumpet Concerto in my collection, display them with performer & album data, and allow me to select one

it is important for the library to contain correct tags. By browsing by folder with no tags, you are unable to use the most important feature of MinimServer: intelligent browsing by any tags in any order.

For example:

1) browse by composer: Haydn
2) browse by genre: Concerto
3) browse by instrument: Trumpet
4) browse by soloist and select one
5) choose a work to play

or alternatively:

1) browse by genre: Concerto
2) browse by instrument: Trumpet
3) browse by soloist and select one
4) browse by composer: Haydn
5) choose a work to play

etc.

[RachFan]

(14-05-2022 23:10)simoncn Wrote:  it is important for the library to contain correct tags. By browsing by folder with no tags, you are unable to use the most important feature of MinimServer: intelligent browsing by any tags in any order.

For example:

1) browse by composer: Haydn
2) browse by genre: Concerto
3) browse by instrument: Trumpet
4) browse by soloist and select one
5) choose a work to play

Simon, thank you!

I get that I want the library to contain the correct tags. This is a newbie question, but would my custom directory structure mean that the correct tags are not preserved?

Must I use a simple albumtitle / artist / track architecture for the tags to be preserved?

Can I do both -- custom structure and tags preserved?

Thanks again!

[DavidL]

(14-05-2022 21:51)RachFan Wrote:  I'm just starting, and just found this forum. I have over 1000 CDs (mostly classical), a Cambridge Audio CXN streamer, and QNAP TS 251+ NAS. I am excited about using MinimServer to search my collection. But I have a lot of questions.

Are there any general intro articles? I found a guide for installing MinimServer 2 on a QNAP NAS. That should get me started. Are there also any pinned articles somewhere with general advice and how to avoid common pitfalls?

My biggest puzzle now is how to structure my files. I have just read that the actual file hierarchy won't matter to MinimServer, which is good news to me. I'm hoping to do things like this with MinimServer: find all copies of the Haydn Trumpet Concerto in my collection, display them with performer & album data, and allow me to select one. I must have half a dozen recordings of that concerto scattered in my collection. MinimServer can do this, right?

But I still would like to structure files so that I can find content on my own, if I have to. I thought I would mirror my physical shelving in the file structure, like so:

+ classical / composer / work / performer / album / tracks...

+ jazz / performer / album

+ piano / performer / album

+ trumpet / performer / album

+ soundtracks / composer / album

+ poprock / performer / album

Would this be a good idea? I just read a post advising against dividing classical/composer by works. But I do like putting all my copies of Bach's WTC together, or all my copies of Rachmaninoff Concertos by different performers shelved together -- for example.

I haven't actually started ripping CDs yet. I think dbPowerAmp and MusicBrainz Picard look like my ticket there...

Thank you!

Welcome to the forum.

From my experience I'd suggest you use a very simple file structure e.g. Artist/Album/Track and let your computer do all the heavy lifting involved in searching for the particular combination of (say) genre/composer/work/artist you wish to listen to. To go down this route all you need is software to (1) rip the CDs and extract and store all the associated meta data on your NAS, (2) curate (edit etc) the extracted data to convert it all to a single consistent form (there is no universal standard for CD meta data) and (3) extract and play what you wish from the NAS.
I have no experience of dbPowerAmp or MusicBrainz Picard so cannot offer specific advice for this software. I see dbPowerAmp is recommended for CD ripping and I assume Picard does the curation.
As you have probably gathered from this forum MinimServer software is excellent for accessing music files (particularly classical music) but it does not curate the music files. You will also need a control point (hardware & software) compatible with your Cambridge Audio streamer to compile your request(s) for the music to be played from MinimServer and start playback.

When I started out streaming my ripped music files stored on my NAS I used iTunes software for curation and I have found no reason to change this after 10+ years. This software is very mature and has an excellent user interface that makes curation of music files very simple.

Before you start ripping CDs you need to think carefully and make some major decisions about what you wish to see displayed by MinimServer and edit the meta data accordingly. To give a concrete example for classical music I decided to define several 'Genres' (classical - baroque, classical-classical etc, etc) and to use 'Album' as composer + work (e.g. Beethoven - Symphony No.3). In this way I can search on Genre (Classical - classical) then 'Album' and immediately get a list of all the versions I have of this symphony.

Hope this helps - happy listening!

[simoncn]

(14-05-2022 23:16)RachFan Wrote:  I get that I want the library to contain the correct tags. This is a newbie question, but would my custom directory structure mean that the correct tags are not preserved?

Must I use a simple albumtitle / artist / track architecture for the tags to be preserved?

Can I do both -- custom structure and tags preserved?

Thanks again!

There is no need for any correlation between the directory structure and the tags. For tag browsing, MinimServer does not use the directory structure, only the tags.

[simbun]

Just some further food for thought...

dBpoweramp Music Converter is a great suite of products, but it's strength is really in streamlining the ripping AND tagging in one step, so if you're not going to use it for the tagging it might not be worth the investment. That being said it's still a great ripper but there are other free options out there - especially if you're not going to be using the Music Converter functionality either. I don't use it for a few reasons, the first being that it stores most of its settings in the registry (and it doesn't provide the option to back them up) and the second is that it doesn't use CUETools database for ripping verification (a more feature rich and up to date verification method).
If you do stick with dBpoweramp remember to add the 'CUE Sheet' DSP otherwise you'll lose the CD pre-gap information which is useful when verifying files after the inital rip (this isn't available on the mac version).

If you're on windows I assume you're planning to store as FLAC, if on a mac I guess you're restricted to ALAC. I've also found external album artwork to be more compatible than embedded, but this is really only an issue if you're planning on comverting your music to be used on other systems e.g. Sonos doesn't like embedded album art when using mp3's with ID3v2.4.

You've made a good start in that you're already thinking about how you want to browse your music, so one thing I would say is don't be afraid of adding too much information in the tags, it's trivial to get rid of them yet it can be quite difficult to add them in at a later date e.g. from your original post it seems like you already have a natural division of how you might want to browse your music, so make sure you store Classical/Jazz/Piano/Trumpet/Soundtracks/Poprock somewhere, and probably best not to use Genre as most tagging apps without proper setup will overwrite it.

I wouldn't give the file structure much thought at all at this point, I'd rip a smallish number of discs and just get your tagging down, and once you're happy that you've captured everything you need it's trivial to move the files into your desired structure (based on the tags you have in the files). Picard should offer this, but as a one-off exercise you could also use foobar or mp3tag to do this for you.

Finally, be prepared to review this constantly ;-)

[RachFan]

(15-05-2022 12:27)simbun Wrote:  Just some further food for thought...

dBpoweramp Music Converter is a great suite of products, but it's strength is really in streamlining the ripping AND tagging in one step, so if you're not going to use it for the tagging it might not be worth the investment. That being said it's still a great ripper but there are other free options out there - especially if you're not going to be using the Music Converter functionality either. I don't use it for a few reasons, the first being that it stores most of its settings in the registry (and it doesn't provide the option to back them up) and the second is that it doesn't use CUETools database for ripping verification (a more feature rich and up to date verification method).
If you do stick with dBpoweramp remember to add the 'CUE Sheet' DSP otherwise you'll lose the CD pre-gap information which is useful when verifying files after the inital rip (this isn't available on the mac version).

If you're on windows I assume you're planning to store as FLAC, if on a mac I guess you're restricted to ALAC. I've also found external album artwork to be more compatible than embedded, but this is really only an issue if you're planning on comverting your music to be used on other systems e.g. Sonos doesn't like embedded album art when using mp3's with ID3v2.4.
[...]

Nice -- thanks simbun!

I don't use Windows at home. A friend suggested dbPowerAmp because it's the only software for Mac that has AccurateRip to verify the ripped bits. From my reading, I thought I would use FLAC. I wasn't intending to use iTunes (which is one of my least favorite Mac apps), because I'm hoping that my CXN plays nicely with UPnP software like MinimServer, and will provide access to the MinimServer search controls.

What's the deal with selecting tags? Can't one simply "select all"? Is there a downside to that? (You see, I really am a newbie, and I'm just figuring out how this works!)

Thanks!

[simbun]

(16-05-2022 00:33)RachFan Wrote:  I don't use Windows at home. A friend suggested dbPowerAmp because it's the only software for Mac that has AccurateRip to verify the ripped bits.

That makes sense, you're certainly much more restricted on the mac, although I believe XLD verifies with AccurateRip and it produces CUE sheets.
Here's a useful CD ripper comparison article; I don't know how up to date it is, but it looks like you're right to steer clear of iTunes!

Given you're new to this - unless it's horrible to use - I'd use XLD and make sure it's generating CUE sheets (and keep them alongside the rip), this will mean it's trivial further down the line to identify "special" discs that utilise things like HDCD (requires scanning the files) and pre-emphasis (should be indicated in the CUE sheet), as they're a whole other can of worms (and will represent a tiny minority of discs) that's best left until you're comfortable with everything else you have to get your head around ;-)

(16-05-2022 00:33)RachFan Wrote:  From my reading, I thought I would use FLAC.

If you're not going to play the files on anything apple related then I think you're probably good to go, but I don't think FLAC is natively supported on any apple system - I assume because they didn't create it - so you may be making life more difficult for yourself.

(16-05-2022 00:33)RachFan Wrote:  What's the deal with selecting tags? Can't one simply "select all"? Is there a downside to that?

If you're talking about saving everything Picard/MusicBrainz offers there's no problem with that, but it does give you quite a lot of info that may never be of any use to you, but it won't hurt anything.
I was talking more about capturing data that may be specific to you, like your Classical/Jazz/Piano/Trumpet/Soundtracks/Poprock split, or maybe RIPPED_DATE, basically things that you may find useful to filter on that won't be held on any music database.

[lyapounov]

(16-05-2022 09:27)simbun Wrote:  If you're not going to play the files on anything apple related then I think you're probably good to go, but I don't think FLAC is natively supported on any apple system - I assume because they didn't create it - so you may be making life more difficult for yourself.

I don't understand what you mean by "on a Mac, Flac is not supported".

I am fully Mac equipped, and fully Flac, and I am having no issues whatsoever to play flac files on my Mac. It can be by streaming minimserver with the Linn Kazoo Mac app, or playing directly the file with native QuickTime player when the file is on my Mac; not to mention VLC. Some people are also using Audirvana (which I don't like, for the same reason I hate Roon).

So, sorry to mention, but what you asserted is totally wrong.