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DavidHB · 04-05-2014, 22:30

Clearly, there is something of a groundswell of opinion in favour of the PDF booklet, and I'm certainly not going to argue against that.

Following on from the all helpful information in previous posts, I have been doing a certain amount of investigation. What is currently on offer seems to be a mixed bag; such material as is available is supplied on very different terms by different companies, and we are a long way from the degree of coverage that the metadata libraries, with all their faults, currently provide. Some of the PDFs I have seen are also very poorly produced. But all of that said, it is encouraging that important players in the industry recognise that there is an issue and have made some progress in addressing it.

With regard to the technicalities of delivering the PDF information to the user, it is clear that this has to be, at least to some extent, a function of the control point. It is easy enough to envisage, for instance, another tabbed page in Bubble DS/UPnP which would display the PDF booklet. What is less clear is what role the server has to play. Can the UPnP protocol be used to service requests for booklet information, or does the booklet have to be delivered in some other way?

At this point, I simply don't know whether a feature request for MinimServer makes sense. Even if it does, I'd guess that Simon would be unwilling to provide a feature of that kind unless it is supported by one or more control points. So cooperative effort is required, and that in turn seems to require some agreement as to how the relevant standards are implemented (and if necessary amended) to provided booklet information as part of the streamed music experience. If Simon or some other knowledgeable person were to tell us that such an agreement is in fact in place, that would be very good news.

David

magister · 05-05-2014, 01:53

I would love to have a PDF viewer integrated into my control point, such as David describes. That certainly is the perfect, complete solution. I don't think it's coming anytime soon, unfortunately. Someday . . . I hope.

Meanwhile, I would be very happy to go into MinimServer's folder view, open an album folder, and see the PDF booklet (if I have one for that album) listed. (If a booklet is available, I download it and store it in the same folder as the music files for the album.) Double-tapping would open the booklet using the default PDF viewer on one's tablet or PC. I have no idea if that kind of thing is easy or possible, but it seems like it might be. I wouldn't suggest that Simon spend an inordinate amount of time on such a feature, but if it were fairly easy to implement I think it would be a good solution for the time being. Better than opening a PDF viewer manually and navigating to the PDF through a long path.

simoncn · 05-05-2014, 10:36

(05-05-2014 01:53)magister Wrote: I would love to have a PDF viewer integrated into my control point, such as David describes. That certainly is the perfect, complete solution. I don't think it's coming anytime soon, unfortunately. Someday . . . I hope.

Meanwhile, I would be very happy to go into MinimServer's folder view, open an album folder, and see the PDF booklet (if I have one for that album) listed. (If a booklet is available, I download it and store it in the same folder as the music files for the album.) Double-tapping would open the booklet using the default PDF viewer on one's tablet or PC. I have no idea if that kind of thing is easy or possible, but it seems like it might be. I wouldn't suggest that Simon spend an inordinate amount of time on such a feature, but if it were fairly easy to implement I think it would be a good solution for the time being. Better than opening a PDF viewer manually and navigating to the PDF through a long path.

I don't think it would be easy to implement the approach you are suggesting.

The files you see in folder view are not the contents of the folder. This information is a UPnP AV container that MinimServer sends to the control point and the control point displays just like any other UPnP AV container. The items in the UPnP AV container are UPnP AV items (audio files) that MinimServer has found while scannng the folder.

The only way to include PDF files in the UPnP AV container would befor MinimServer to scan for PDF files in the folder and send these to the control point as the UPnP AV "textItem" type. I don't think there are currently any control points that can display such items, so the result would be at best an entry in the list that does nothing when the user taps on it, or at worst some unpredictable behaviour by the control point.

The possibility of unpredictable behaviour would require a new MinimServer option to enable the discovery and display of these items. It would be a substantial piece of work to modify the current MinimServer scanning and caching mechanism (which deals with audio files only) to optionally handle PDF files as well.

I could go on, but I hope this is enough to show why something that might appear simple from a user perspective raises some complex issues from an implementation perspective.

bbrip · (This post was last modified: 05-05-2014 11:45 by bbrip.)

I agree that there is pobably little point in going thru all this effort if it is pretty clear that no control point will be able to take advantage of the feature. Therefore it might be a good idea to get "buy-in" from one of the leading Control points (such as LUMIN or Bubble DS) to arrive at a common approach and if they are willing to support an include the feature, it might be worth the journey...

For the time being, I am reasonably happy with my workaround of storing all my digital books in ibooks for reading while listening. Needs a switch of the apps, but no big deal really..

bbrip

DavidHB · 05-05-2014, 11:52

(05-05-2014 10:36)simoncn Wrote: I don't think it would be easy to implement the approach you are suggesting.

... so the result would be at best an entry in the list that does nothing when the user taps on it, or at worst some unpredictable behaviour by the control point.

... I hope this is enough to show why something that might appear simple from a user perspective raises some complex issues from an implementation perspective.

I rather feared that this would be the case.

From my user perspective, it is essential that any new feature is based on accepted standards. There is nothing worse than committing money and effort to making something work on one's system, only to find that it is non-standard and unsupportable in the longer term.

David

classical11 · 06-05-2014, 03:33

Lack of explicit support for PDF booklets in the UPnP standard is unfortunate but hopefully there is a way to implement this that does not cause any side issues if the control point does not support this feature.

Simon, you had a few ideas when you investigated this feature request a while back (e.g. using <dc:relation> tag). Is that still an option? And more importantly, are you still considering implementing this feature?

This is the link to the original discussion:
https://forum.minimserver.com/showthread.php?tid=567

I realise this is a difficult feature to implement that needs careful consideration but it would be really great if booklets were supported at some point. I was particularly encouraged by Bubble developer's interest in implementing this. So it seems likely that there would be at least one very high quality control point supporting this feature if it gets implemented in MinimServer.

AllThatJazz · 06-05-2014, 08:50

Greetings to all,

I'm planning to migrate my iTunes library to ms, and have a question about symphonies. Specifically, when using the Orchestra and Conductor tags for symphonic works with no soloist or main performer, is it advisable to leave the Artist tag empty?

simoncn · 06-05-2014, 09:14

(06-05-2014 03:33)classical11 Wrote: Lack of explicit support for PDF booklets in the UPnP standard is unfortunate but hopefully there is a way to implement this that does not cause any side issues if the control point does not support this feature.

Simon, you had a few ideas when you investigated this feature request a while back (e.g. using <dc:relation> tag). Is that still an option? And more importantly, are you still considering implementing this feature?

This is the link to the original discussion:
https://forum.minimserver.com/showthread.php?tid=567

I realise this is a difficult feature to implement that needs careful consideration but it would be really great if booklets were supported at some point. I was particularly encouraged by Bubble developer's interest in implementing this. So it seems likely that there would be at least one very high quality control point supporting this feature if it gets implemented in MinimServer.

I have reviewed this discussion thread and I'm not convinced that using dc:relation to pass PDF URLs is a good approach. If support for PDF documents were to be implemented by MinimServer in a future release, I think it would be better for the server to send PDF URLs to the control point as textItem objects.

The other aspect of the previous discussion that remains unresolved is how the server would discover and identify relevant PDF booklets and associate them with tracks, albums or groups. This is not a simple matter, and I'm hesitant to invent a MinimServer-specific solution for this.

There is also the larger issue of how other forms of related information of various kinds (artist bios, composer bios, etc.) could be presented to the user by the control point. Many of these resources will be linked from the web, so a web-based solution that can handle all related resources might be preferable to a server-based solution that applies to PDF booklets only.

simoncn · (This post was last modified: 06-05-2014 11:34 by simoncn.)

(06-05-2014 08:50)AllThatJazz Wrote: Greetings to all,

I'm planning to migrate my iTunes library to ms, and have a question about symphonies. Specifically, when using the Orchestra and Conductor tags for symphonic works with no soloist or main performer, is it advisable to leave the Artist tag empty?

Either the Artist tag or the AlbumArtist tag is used when matching discs from an album set that are in different folders and also when matching tracks from an album that are in different folders. Leaving both these tags empty might cause this matching process to fail in some cases.

AllThatJazz · (This post was last modified: 06-05-2014 11:50 by AllThatJazz.)

Thanks for your swift reply, Simon.

So, would it be sufficient to put the orchestra in the Artist and AlbumArtist fields? Or should I also include the conductor in those fields as well?

[Edit]
Just tagged a box set of Bruckner symphonies conducted by Asahina with various Japanese orchestras. By putting the respective orchestra in the Artist field and Asahina in the AlbumArtist field, all the discs grouped together correctly, so for now I'll follow this method.