not all albums are shown - album art in confusion, multiple values as a reason?

[Knulp]

Hello,

I’m new to MinimServer and to this Forum. Very glad, that I’ve found both (sorry for my English by the way, I am from Germany and don’t speak fluently).

The first steps with MinimServer have been very successful. But now there is a problem that I’m not able to solve: MinimServer doesn’t show all of the content.

The Cello Sonata op. 69 of Beethoven I’ve got 8 times for example. But MiminServer shows only two of them.

I’ve tagged with Foobar (e. g. the recording with Casals, Schulhoff):
Artist: Beethoven, Album Title: Cellosonate Nr. 3, op. 69, Album Artist: Casals, Schulhoff, Track Titles: 1. Allegro 2. … 3. … 4. …, Date: 1930, Genre: Classical, EAN: 636943194928, Label: Naxos, Composer: Beethoven, Performer: Casals, Pablo; Schulhoff, Otto, Worknumber: op. 69, Tonart: A-Dur, Subgenre: Kammermusik, Subsubgenre: Duette, Subsubsubgenre: Cellosonaten, Discnumber 1, Totaldiscs: 2

The name of the folder on the NAS is Casals, Horszowski [disc 1], which is together with Casals, Horszowski [disc 2] in the folder Casals, Horszowski, Schulhoff 1930er

My Properties of Index Tag are: Artist, Date, Genre, Composer, Conductor, Orchestra, Subgenre, Subsubgenre, Subsubsubgenre, Worknumber, Tonart, Performer, Ensemble, Choir

What I want to do is searching my music by using tags, e. g. pushing first Composer: Beethoven, then Worknumber: op. 69, then album. As a result there should be all of the 8 albums of op. 69 but there are only two of them! Furthermore not all of the covers are shown correctly. For example the recording with Schiefen/Perl comes with the cover of Casals/Serkin.

Another try: browsing by using the folder view: Beethoven/Cellosonaten … All eight folders are there! But then, entering one of the folder, e. g. Tsutsumi,Turini, then Tsutsumi, Turini [disc 1], all of the covers are wrong (they come from the 2 albums mentioned above). Playing one track there are the metadatas: Title: I. Allegro ma non tanto, Album: Cellosonate Nr. 3, op. 69, Artist: Beethoven, Composer: Beethoven, Ludwig van, Track number …, Duration …, Year: 1980, Genre: Classical. Not shown are the Album artist and the Performer. That means all of the shown Metadatas but date are the same. Could this be the problem?

My idea is, that MimicServer isn’t able to handle the multiple values in both fields with the described mismatch as a result. Don’t know, if I’m right. I’ve been spending many hours to solve this problem. No way.

Any ideas, what I can do?

[simoncn]

The Casals, Schulhoff album and the Tsutsumi, Turini album are both tagged "Album: Cellosonate Nr. 3, op. 69, Artist: Beethoven". Because the Album and Artist tags match and the albums have multiple discs, these albums are being merged and this is causing the problems you are seeing.

The best way to fix this is to change the Artist tag values to something based on the performing artists rather than the composer name.

[Knulp]

Hi, thank you very much for the fast answer. Good to know the reason (bad to know how much effort ist necessary to change the Artist Field).

One further question: Just now I'm ripping the 51 CD-Box 'Sviatoslav Richter - Complete Decca, Philips & DG Recordings'. There are three Recordings of Schumanns Toccata op. 7 played by Richter. The only difference beneath the CD number and the filename ist the recording date: 1959, May/June 1986, July 1986. Is there a solution for this? I'm asking because the one you give me doesn't work for this obviously.

Till now I've got the file "Richter - Complete Decca, Philips and DG Recordings" an then the further files:
CD 01 - Bach, Englische Suiten Nr. 3, 4, 6
CD 02 - Bach, Französische Suiten Nr. 2, 4, 6, Toccaten
CD 03 - Bach, Italienisches Konzert BWV 971 ua
and so on

Is ist helpful to delete the file "Richter - Complete Decca, Philips and DG Recordings" and only use Files like "Richter - Complete Decca - CD 01" etc.? I'am asking this because you write in your answer "... and the albums have multiple discs". This let me hope I can leave the artist field unaffected, if I only change the directory-name to avoid multiple discs. Am I right?

[simoncn]

The recommended solution for preventing merging of multiple recordings of the same work by the same artist with different dates is to use a match filter. See this section for details.

If you eliminate multiple discs (no DISCNUMBER tags and no (disc n) or [disc n] suffix in album titles), you will not have merging problems as long as you don't have multiple albums in the same folder and you leave the mergeFolderAlbums property set to false.

[DavidHB]

Your problem with the Richter set is somewhat different to the earlier issue. The huge classical boxed sets can be something of a tagging challenge. Simon's recommendations (above) have to be counted as the official advice, but the following alternatives based on my own practice may be helpful.

Faced with your 51 disc boxed set, and assuming you want to treat it as a single album, I would give it the Album title "Richter - Complete Decca, Philips and DG Recordings", and then use the DISCSUBTITLE for the individual discs - "CD 01 - Bach, Englische Suiten Nr. 3, 4, 6" and so on. If there are correct track number tags for each track, that should differentiate sufficiently between the individual tracks. Alternatively, you could treat each disc as a separate album - "Richter - Complete Decca, Philips and DG Recordings - CD 01 - Bach, Englische Suiten Nr. 3, 4, 6" - but those album titles may get very long.

With a 51 disc set, it makes sense in any case to have a separate sub-folder for each disk, and to have file names in which the track title is prefaced by the file number. But, assuming that you have "Sviatoslav Richter" as the Album Artist throughout, if you are using DISCSUBTITLE MinimServer will still index the whole set as a single album with individually titled disks.

In the case where there are 3 versions of the same work with the same artist in the one album, I would use TITLE tags of the form "Toccata op. 7 (1959 recording)", so that it is clear in the control point and player display which performance is being played. This should also avoid any confusion between the tracks. If, however, you prefer the tracks to show up with identical names, use match filters, as suggested by Simon.

David

[Knulp]

@Simon: Thank you very much again

@David: Very interesting to read. Unfortunally I decided years ago to use the Album-field für the work-name, e. g. Symphony No. 3, op. 55. I did this, because my mp3-player at that time read only few ID-Tags.

Considering now to change my Fields to the now recommendated way: Artist ist the artist instead of the composer and album ist the album instead of the work-title.

I'm going to try something for a while and will decide after this. Got a lot homework do to now.

Thanks a lot
Thomas

[DavidHB]

@Knulp

What tagging program are you using?

Once you get your head around it (which isn't specially difficult), MP3Tag makes retagging very large numbers of files remarkably easy. If you use its Options dialog to add the fields/tags you normally use to the tag panel that sits alongside the grid (see the screenshot below), you can select and edit hundreds of files in one go. There are also facilities for copying one or more tag value(s) to another (or to a file name), again to an almost unlimited number of files in one go. And so on.

I have about 700 albums (many of which are multi-disc). I have been able to reorganise sets of tags in my complete collection in an evening.

David

[Knulp]

@ David

Your example is very helpful. Yes, I know mp3tag and it’s installed, but I’m using it only seldom.

I’ve been using foobar since many years, also for tagging. First I wasn’t interested in further fields. But after a while, years ago now, I found out, that I could use my own fields for different views of my albums. So I wrote the (don’t know the word) sentence for the different views, for example: “$if(%<Conductor>%,%<Conductor>%|%composer%|[%subgenre%|][%subsubgenre%|][%subsubsubgenre%|]%album%|[%date% ][- %Performer%]|[%tracknumber%. ]%title%)”,which shows first the Conductor, second the composer and so on.

After rethinking my typical approaches for searching I decided to add new fields: Subgenre, Subsubgenre and Subsubsubgenre (genre is classical) and a few more.

The Bach-Symphony in your example has only the field Subgenre. It’s value is “Orchestral music” (in German). The Beethoven Cellosonate, op. 6 has the Subgenre “Chamber music”, the Subsubgenre “Duets” and the Subsubgenre “Cello Sonatas”.

I’m using this lot. For example: I would like to see all Cello Sonatas played by Alban Gerhard. Or: From which Composer I have Cello Sonatas. Or: Show me all works by Beethoven in c-minor. Or: Show me all Symphonies conducted by Kondrashin. Or: Show me op. 69 by Beethoven. Or: All Schumann by Richter etc.

Leaving the times of foobar and the PC in the Past I’m now searching for similar comfort with NAS, MiminServer and the AndroidTablet.

This afternoon I renamed tons of foldernames which very often had the names “CD 1”, “CD 2”, “Symphony No. 1”, Symphony No. 2”, “Violin concerto No. 1” etc. Not good, as I know now. After doing this all of my problems seem to be solved. For example all of my 8 recordings of Beethoven op. 9 are displayed and have the right cover. All three Schumann Toccatas were shown an all of the different searchings, which I described, are possible now. So I have reached what I were searching for.

Nevertheless, I said it before, your example is helpful. It shows me that there are possibilities which I don’t know by now: The fields Composersort, Compositionsort, Group are interesting. I am going to read about it.

For me it is astonishing, that you can handle your archive without a worknumber-field. For the Orchestra Suites of Telemann for example are so many different names in use, that I am only using the TWV 55:xx-worknumber to find it.

By the way: I have a recording of the Wq 183/1 with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment too, by the way. It's the one with Leohnhard from 1988. Tried to insert a snapshot for comparing reason, but it seems I need webspace to do this which I have not.

Thomas

[DavidHB]

@Thomas

Thanks for the many interesting points in your reply. I suppose the main point is that we all have our own approach to the tagging process; there is no one 'right' way of doing things.

My own approach developed in two ways. I started from the order in which I store my physical CD and LP collections, which developed over a number of years. I also learned about the limitations of the most widely used tagging schemes in the course of early (and mostly unsatisfactory) experiments in ripping CDs to MP3. About four years ago, I decided to standardise on FLAC and also, somewhat by accident, discovered MinimServer, which, for the first time, allowed me to use the organisation of my physical media collections as the starting point for organising the digital collection.

The key point is that, for me, tagging is simply a means to browse and search the collection; I am not using tags to create an encyclopedia of music. While I have considered adding multiple genres and/or sub-genres to my files, the fact is that (other than during the main classical period - say 1750 to 1830) every composer is different, and I have thought it unlikely that I would ever want to browse by detailed genre classifications. Indeed, just 'classical' and 'non-classical' would probably work for me.

Similar considerations apply to the 'work number', by which I suppose you mean opus number. For me, the opus or catalogue numbers are part of the work name and so belong in the COMPOSITION tag. They too tend to have different significance for different composers. With some exceptions (the Haydn string quartets for example) I tend not to use them for browsing.

I note your interest in GROUP. This makes something of a pair with COMPOSITION, and often, but by no means invariably, I give the two tags the same value. GROUP is for selecting works (particularly multi-track works) within an album. COMPOSITION is for selecting a work without selecting an album first; indeed ALBUM may be selected after COMPOSITION to choose between different recordings of the same work. These options are all part of the richness of the MinimServer 'intelligent browsing'.

As regards the C.P.E. Bach symphonies, which ought to be better known than they are, I think you would enjoy the lively Rebecca Miller interpretations, on Signum Records. I have them as a 96kHz/24bit download, which is available on the Hyperion website.

David