Weird issue with display on receiver

[paulgj]

This is kinda strange but when I am playing albums on my receiver using Minimserver, if the album has an album artist then that value is displayed as the artist (which is correct to my way of thinking) on the now playing screen, but only on the first track of the album. On the subsequent tracks the display shows all the artist tags combined.

For example I have my Emerson, Lake and Palmer albums tagged as:

ALBUMARTIST=Emerson, Lake & Palmer
ARTIST=Keith Emerson
ARTIST=Greg Lake
ARTIST=Carl Palmer

The now playing screen on the first track shows the album name, track name and Emerson, Lake and Palmer. On the following tracks it shows Keith Emerson, Greg Lake, Carl Palmer

I tried the same thing using miniDLNA and it doesn't happen when choosing music from that server. The Album artist if exists is shown for all tracks of the album while playing.

Using BubbleUPnP I can see that minimServer supplies the ALBUMARTIST and ARTIST info, and miniDLNA supplies only artist info which is either ALBUMARTIST if available or the ARTIST tag.

Obviously the display on the receiver has issues when the album artist and artist are sent to it.

Hopefully there is a way to just send the albumartist or artist but not both to mimic the miniDLNA behavior that results in correct now playing screen?

Thanks!

[simoncn]

To exactly mimic what miniDLNA does, you could do the following:

1) In the itemTags property, add a new tag ArtistValue. This makes the ArtistValue tag available for later processing (see below).

2) In the tagValue property, add ArtistValue.replace={AlbumArtist, Artist}. This sets the ArtistValue tag to the AlbumArtist value if present and the Artist value(s) otherwise.

3) In the tagFormat property, set Artist.displayFormat={$artistValue}. This tells MinimServer to use the value(s) of the ArtistValue tag as the artist information that is sent to the control point.

4) In the tagCustom property, remove the AlbumArtist.displayRole setting. This tells MinimServer not to send album artist information to the control point.

[paulgj]

Thank you Simon I will try that tonight.

I would never have figured out those steps on my own.

[simoncn]

This could be simplified with a fairly small change to MinimServer. MinimServer maintains an internal artistValue field that is effectively the same as the value that you are creating in steps 1 and 2. This internal value is currently not accessible for use in step 3 but it should be possible to make it accessible without too much difficulty. I will put this on my list of possible enhancements for a future version of MinimServer.

[paulgj]

thanks again Simon, those steps worked perfectly.