Simon : thank you !!!

[lyapounov]

As everybody knows, tagging music is a nightmare.

Specially classical. When I was teaching database, long time ago, I gave to my student the job of making the conceptual model of classical music CD.

There is the concept of album, CD, track; then the concept of piece of music, which has sub moments (movements of a symphony, aria in an opera), and of course the relation with tracks varies from one album to another (I remember the very first CD of Gould playing the Goldberg had only one track, and the variation were coded in the index, a kind of subtrack, a concept which was part of the CD specification, which no one uses any more); then you add the instrument, interprets, and the concert, or recording, and you have a bloody nightmare. And what about Barenboim as an example, who is a pianist, a conductor, and sometimes both (its superb version of Mozart's concertos)

To this you add that sometimes you have Beethoven, sometimes Ludwig van Beethoven. Not to name the fact that the bloody French (I am french by the way :-) name Chostakovitch what the rest of the world name Shostakovich (t has dissapeared, and C becomes S, uneasy to sort) except the Russian who name him Шостако́вич; and of course Dimitri, Dmitry, etc...

So for me, the only solution is a combination of tagging and a perfect directory structure. This is what I have done : all my music is in a well designed (to my taste :-) and clear directory structure.

This is why I want to thank Simon : because the minim server allows for a good combination of both tagging and directory structure !! many other servers just sort on tags; like iTunes, making it a nightmare to navigate (there is no navigation actually).

The other feature which I love in Minimserer is the capacity to follow symbolic links, and so to have the same album in different places without copying it.

On my Synology, I have to go through the ssh terminal to do it, but it works. As an example, I have created a specific directory for the 100 CD of the Brilliant Russian Archive set, with subdirectory per interpret; then in the Prokofieff (Prokofiev, sorry :-) section (under Classical top level), I created symbolic links to all the CDs which contains Prokofiev. Same for other composers.

Voila : thank you so much, Simon. Your server is superb !!!

[Martin H]

As per other posts - I am also a starry eyed fan of minimserver. Having revisited my tagging (that bit is a nightmare chore still although greatly helped by Mp3tag and DBpoweramp etc.) of a mushrooming collection I have unlocked even more power from it enabling me to discover things that had TBH remained buried. I had never used the folder view for anything other than navigating straight to a specific folder and only recently realised I can flip to a tag view of a subset grouped under a folder. That together with a new collection tag that I have used to segregate different members of the family plus a pending 'genre review' (another nightmare all of its own) is making things a lot more fun. Sad that I am excited about this but true.

But as well as using its power it's the elegance of the design that I admire. Having worked in, around technical design for a long while there is a huge power in something as well designed and thought through as minimserver. Long may it continue.

[nrwatson]

Yes thanks Simon

[simoncn]

Thanks very much!