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simoncn · 20-02-2012, 00:35

Thanks very much for sharing this! It's interesting to talk about the solutions that different people have found for this.

(19-02-2012 11:43)rb73 Wrote: Here's my approach:

First of all, I dropped the concept of CD/album. When looking for some piece of music to play, I'm not interested in the CD it happened to be on. So, if a CD contains symphonies 39 and 40 by Mozart, the tracks of symphony #39 get the Album tag "KV543 Symphony no.39", and the tracks of symphony #40 get Album tag "KV550 Symphony no.40".

I understand why you would do this with Twonky. I prefer not to lose the album information (though I can imagine that over time I won't use it so much), so I added the Group concept to MinimServer as a way of capturing this information without losing the Album information.

Quote:As I was using Twonky until recently, I added the composer and the artist to the Album tag: otherwise all different recordings of "KV543 Symphony no.39" would end up together. I.e. if I happen to have to recordings, under "KV543 ..." Twonky would show two first movements, two second movements, ...
I assume that MinimServer handles this case properly, but haven't had the time to check it. If so I can get back to proper tags for the work (Album).

This should work OK in MinimServer for both Albums and Groups. I solved this problem by limiting an Album or a Group to a single directory, so if two Albums or Groups have the same names but are in different directories, they won't be merged together. This could be a problem for multi-disc Albums or Groups, and I'm working on a solution for that.

Quote:The tracks are similarly "enriched", for the same purpose of disambiguation. I know, it looks horrible, especially in control points with limited screen real estate, but it was the only way I could figure out to remain sane while using Twonky.

I understand why you needed to do that. I'm actually going in the other direction now, by removing some composer/artist information that was added to tracks by ripper software or in purchased downloads.

Quote:
I don't bother changing the track numbers, as their only function to me is to provide a sort order. I don't care if KV550 happens to have track numbers 5-8

MinimServer does the same thing for Groups. Like you, I don't see it as a problem. It's a shame that the DS insists on starting the numbering at 1 though, even though the control point is showing the first track as number 5.

Quote:If a work happens to be split across multiple CDs I prepend the disc number to the track number, which gives something live 101, 102, ..., 201, 202, ...
If the slightly weird track numbers start bugging me, it wouldn't take much time to normalise them using MP3tag, but I haven't seen the need for that yet

I'm still thinking about how best to handle that when I add support for merging multiple discs into a single album.

Quote:So, if I'm reading things right I don't need to use the Composition tag, because for me a Composition is a single Album. Right?

I think you would find the Composition tag useful, because you can do a tag search by Composition but you can't do a tag search by Album. So you could do something like Composer->Beethoven->Composition->Symphony No. 5->Conductor->Karajan->Orchestra->Philharmonia. You can't do that with Album because after doing Composer->Beethoven->Album you'll just get a flat list of all albums (works) by Beethoven.

Quote:Of course, with the introduction of MinimServer the world has become a much better place, and I've now started adding Orchestra and Conductor tags.

I already had a Genre tag and a Composer tag, and used the Artist tag for the soloist/main performer.

That makes sense. I'm tagging the orchestra under Artist at the moment, but I might change that.

Quote:The Album Artist tag is left empty to separate classical from non-classical stuff.

I've seen that mentioned on the forums. I'm still thinking about whether I can put AlbumArtist to any good use.

Quote:The Date tag is left empty, as it clashes with the sort order for non-classical music. When looking at non-classical music I prefer to sort Albums by AlbumArtist and then by Date. I used albumSortTags = AlbumArtist,Artist,Composer,Date.
However, for classical music I prefer to see the Albums in alphabetical order, regardless of the Date.
I wonder if there's a way to accomplish this without running separate servers with distinct albumSortTags properties?

If you have Composer and Artist in the Album tag, an alphabetical sort for classical albums is effectively a sort by Composer first and Artist second. That's still different from your sort order for non-classical albums, though.

I've tried to think of some way for MinimServer to support multiple album sort orders, but none of these works if there's any possibility of having a list of albums that includes a mixture of albums with different sort orders. Running two servers with disjoint content directories is an effective way of eliminating that possibility.

Quote:Ideally I'd like to use a proper Date for the classical music too, but it's not a major thing for me.

JW

I suppose if someone has a lot of historic classical recordings, it might be important for them to be able to sort by recording date.

Thanks very much for starting the discussion! I hope we'll see more thoughts on this from a few others.

Simon