Curtailment of Album Tag by Hyphen

[Budgie]

Hi,
It has been a while and that is because everything works so I have been listening to music instead of nerding but I have discovered an issue with regard to the treatment of a hyphen in the Album tag. I am running two qnap NAS boxes a TS 209 Pro II and a TS 559 Pro II, the former running Twonky 6.0.39 and the latter Minimserver but both on the same data and this has enabled me to make comparisons while I sort out my tagging typos.

Pending any better informed method I store my flac classical files in the form Music>Genre>Composer>Album and the Album tag is in the form "Händel - Alcina (Richard Hickcox)"

Using Bubble DS as control point on Samsung SIII I have been able to compare library searches from each server and find that with Minimserver served files, the Album titles are curtailed at the " - ". In consequence I get a list of a dozen titles "Händel" and only by knowing the conductor can I work out which opera it is. The same search on the Twonky served data gives me the full title.

I cannot advise if this has been the situation from the start but I do recall I had a similar problem some time ago with Twonky and asked questions about syntax and illegal characters on the twonky forum but didn't bring this to a satisfactory conclusion as I changed my tagging style and didn't notice the problem again.

I have been using Easytag on openSUSE machine for all tagging so I do not think it is the fault is there so please can somebody shine any light on this issue?

Budgie

[simoncn]

(25-09-2012 17:51)Budgie Wrote:  Using Bubble DS as control point on Samsung SIII I have been able to compare library searches from each server and find that with Minimserver served files, the Album titles are curtailed at the " - ". In consequence I get a list of a dozen titles "Händel" and only by knowing the conductor can I work out which opera it is. The same search on the Twonky served data gives me the full title.

I have a number of albums with titles in this format and I've never seen this problem. Is it possible that the '-' character isn't a regular hyphen, but some Unicode character that looks similar?

You can check for this by using the writeAllTags property on the MinimServer Advanced page. To get a list of all the tags in your files, you can do the following:
1) Set the writeAllTags property to the name of a file. It's probably a good idea to make this a file in the /share/Public directory of the NAS, so it's easy for you to copy it to your computer.
2) Press OK to accept this setting, then select Restart.
3) When MinimServer has finished restarting (green icon), there should be a file on the NAS containing a list of all your tags.
4) Clear the writeAllTags field and press OK. You don't need to create this file every time you start MinimServer.
5) Copy the tags file to your computer. The contents will be in the UTF-8 character set. From this, you should be able to see if these album names contain a regular hyphen (0x2d) or something else. If it isn't a regular hyphen, please let me know what its hex encoding is. Another (likely) possibility is that the tags file will show the truncated album names.

Please let me know what you find in the tags file.

[Budgie]

(25-09-2012 19:33)simoncn Wrote:  

(25-09-2012 17:51)Budgie Wrote:  Using Bubble DS as control point on Samsung SIII I have been able to compare library searches from each server and find that with Minimserver served files, the Album titles are curtailed at the " - ". In consequence I get a list of a dozen titles "Händel" and only by knowing the conductor can I work out which opera it is. The same search on the Twonky served data gives me the full title.

I have a number of albums with titles in this format and I've never seen this problem. Is it possible that the '-' character isn't a regular hyphen, but some Unicode character that looks similar?

You can check for this by using the writeAllTags property on the MinimServer Advanced page. To get a list of all the tags in your files, you can do the following:
1) Set the writeAllTags property to the name of a file. It's probably a good idea to make this a file in the /share/Public directory of the NAS, so it's easy for you to copy it to your computer.
2) Press OK to accept this setting, then select Restart.
3) When MinimServer has finished restarting (green icon), there should be a file on the NAS containing a list of all your tags.
4) Clear the writeAllTags field and press OK. You don't need to create this file every time you start MinimServer.
5) Copy the tags file to your computer. The contents will be in the UTF-8 character set. From this, you should be able to see if these album names contain a regular hyphen (0x2d) or something else. If it isn't a regular hyphen, please let me know what its hex encoding is. Another (likely) possibility is that the tags file will show the truncated album names.

Please let me know what you find in the tags file.

Hi Simon,
Understood. Will have to go back to earlier thread about getting minimwatch to work on Linux laptop. If I recall there were firewall issues. Late now so will work on it tomorrow. Thanks for the instant reply once more.
Budgie

[Budgie]

(25-09-2012 19:33)simoncn Wrote:  

(25-09-2012 17:51)Budgie Wrote:  Using Bubble DS as control point on Samsung SIII I have been able to compare library searches from each server and find that with Minimserver served files, the Album titles are curtailed at the " - ". In consequence I get a list of a dozen titles "Händel" and only by knowing the conductor can I work out which opera it is. The same search on the Twonky served data gives me the full title.

I have a number of albums with titles in this format and I've never seen this problem. Is it possible that the '-' character isn't a regular hyphen, but some Unicode character that looks similar?

You can check for this by using the writeAllTags property on the MinimServer Advanced page. To get a list of all the tags in your files, you can do the following:
1) Set the writeAllTags property to the name of a file. It's probably a good idea to make this a file in the /share/Public directory of the NAS, so it's easy for you to copy it to your computer.
2) Press OK to accept this setting, then select Restart.
3) When MinimServer has finished restarting (green icon), there should be a file on the NAS containing a list of all your tags.
4) Clear the writeAllTags field and press OK. You don't need to create this file every time you start MinimServer.
5) Copy the tags file to your computer. The contents will be in the UTF-8 character set. From this, you should be able to see if these album names contain a regular hyphen (0x2d) or something else. If it isn't a regular hyphen, please let me know what its hex encoding is. Another (likely) possibility is that the tags file will show the truncated album names.

Please let me know what you find in the tags file.

Hi Simon,

I can only use minimwatch from openSUSE laptop by turning off firewall but, having done so, have saved the writeAllTags as you instructed above. File is a bit too big to copy here but I can send if you tell me how/where.

Meanwhile the file is nothing like what I expected. For example I have 22 Händel opera albums all with album tag in the form "Händel - opera name (conductor's name)" but in the file they are shown as "opera name (conductor's name). The "Händel" - has been ignored. The reverse of what I see on control point which shows Händel but no opera name (the artist tag entry is shewn correctly below). What is going on here?

Amongst the genres listed I can see the delimiter \\ and commas where I have not yet edited correctly. Is this how files for which I have two genres should appear in this list?

Regards,
Budgie

[simoncn]

(26-09-2012 23:52)Budgie Wrote:  Hi Simon,

I can only use minimwatch from openSUSE laptop by turning off firewall but, having done so, have saved the writeAllTags as you instructed above. File is a bit too big to copy here but I can send if you tell me how/where.

Please zip or gzip the file and add it to a forum post here as an attachment. The attachments section is just below where you type your reply. You need to put the filename in the New Attachment box (use the Browse button to make this easier) and then press the Add Attachment button on the right-hand side of the page.

Quote:Meanwhile the file is nothing like what I expected. For example I have 22 Händel opera albums all with album tag in the form "Händel - opera name (conductor's name)" but in the file they are shown as "opera name (conductor's name). The "Händel" - has been ignored. The reverse of what I see on control point which shows Händel but no opera name (the artist tag entry is shewn correctly below). What is going on here?

I'm not sure yet. Perhaps I'll have some ideas when I see the writeAllTags file.

It would be very helpful if you could let me know what is the audio format of your files (FLAC, MP3, ALAC, etc.), and what tagging program you used to enter the tags (exact version and platform).

Quote:Amongst the genres listed I can see the delimiter \\ and commas where I have not yet edited correctly. Is this how files for which I have two genres should appear in this list?

They should appear as two separate tags of the form:
GENRE=value1
GENRE=value2

If they're appearing as:
GENRE=value1\\value2
or:
GENRE=value1,value2
this means the Genre tags in your files aren't in the correct format.

[Budgie]

[snip]
Please zip or gzip the file and add it to a forum post here as an attachment. The attachments section is just below where you type your reply. You need to put the filename in the New Attachment box (use the Browse button to make this easier) and then press the Add Attachment button on the right-hand side of the page.

Here goes. Title is not very imaginative. I shall date and number in future but this one is just Test.tar.gz

[snip] What is going on here?
[/quote]
I'm not sure yet. Perhaps I'll have some ideas when I see the writeAllTags file.

It would be very helpful if you could let me know what is the audio format of your files (FLAC, MP3, ALAC, etc.), and what tagging program you used to enter the tags (exact version and platform).

OK. Most classical files are FLAC. Earlier ripping was to MP3 until I had renderers which would handle FLAC and now I only rip to FLAC. The basic tagging from public databases is hopeless and now I am using EasyTAG 2.1.7. I might also have used earlier version. Platform is:-
System OS: Linux 3.1.10-1.16-desktop x86_64
System: openSUSE 12.1 (x86_64)
Desktop: KDE: 4.7.2 (4.7.2) "release 5"

Quote:Amongst the genres listed I can see the delimiter \\ and commas where I have not yet edited correctly. Is this how files for which I have two genres should appear in this list?

They should appear as two separate tags of the form:
GENRE=value1
GENRE=value2

If they're appearing as:
GENRE=value1\\value2
or:
GENRE=value1,value2
this means the Genre tags in your files aren't in the correct format.
[/quote]

As I suspected. Something is wrong. I have Puddletag installed but will need to get used to it. Will wait for your next instruction.
Best wishes and many thanks again.
Budgie.
  Test.tar.gz (Size: 243.43 KB / Downloads: 3)