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Computation of number of albums ...
26-02-2019, 17:57
Post: #1
Computation of number of albums ...
I have a very rigorous folder structure. An album is a leaf of the tree structure, and there is no subfolder. Top structure is 1) Renaissance, 2) Baroque, 3) Classical etc...

According to minimserver, I have 5636 albums

According to my number of folders, I have 5928 albums.

Now, many albums have the same title, which can explain the discrepency. Three reasons for this:

- Box sets which do contain n CD, each CD is an album, but bad me, they all have the same title (example: "The complete Verve recording of Teddy Wilson" boxset has 5 CD, so 5 subfolder, but each CD has the same album name, and a different discnumber. Very bad of me. I am correcting this)

- Two albums have the same name. Example:

6) Jazz/Paul Bley/1994 - Time Will Tell/
7) Pop Rock Folk Electro/Robert Cray/2003 - Time Will Tell/

Both album have the same title "Time Will Tell"

- Two version of the same album (original, and remix. Or flac versus SACD. Pink Floyd is very good at this game)

So, to have minimserver realigned with my library, I need to retag a lot of albums. Fortunatly, I created my own database, so I know where they are.

Maybe when I am truly retired... :-)

O well, when I say that tagging is a nightmare, I mean it !!
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27-02-2019, 16:25
Post: #2
RE: Computation of number of albums ...
(26-02-2019 17:57)lyapounov Wrote:  O well, when I say that tagging is a nightmare, I mean it !!

have a look at the docs ..... section
TagOption: and in there
album.sorttags={......}

hint: ask youself what might happen if you for example use
album.sorttags={album,discnumber}

and remember ... defining about how MinimServer does sort/split things won't affect about how things are .display(ed) since that's a separated configuration thing.
Means if not being defined an album gets displayed using the albumtitle.

And no I wouldn't recommend wasting your life with tagging. MinimServer is most times clever enough to compensate such things (as long as your tagging strategy is same all across your collection).
You could likely solve most issues that way, but I wouldn't recommend using the discnumber this way. This is something where you should think about something differnt.
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28-02-2019, 05:35
Post: #3
RE: Computation of number of albums ...
(27-02-2019 16:25)aliasname Wrote:  
(26-02-2019 17:57)lyapounov Wrote:  O well, when I say that tagging is a nightmare, I mean it !!

have a look at the docs ..... section
TagOption: and in there
album.sorttags={......}

hint: ask youself what might happen if you for example use
album.sorttags={album,discnumber}

and remember ... defining about how MinimServer does sort/split things won't affect about how things are .display(ed) since that's a separated configuration thing.
Means if not being defined an album gets displayed using the albumtitle.

And no I wouldn't recommend wasting your life with tagging. MinimServer is most times clever enough to compensate such things (as long as your tagging strategy is same all across your collection).
You could likely solve most issues that way, but I wouldn't recommend using the discnumber this way. This is something where you should think about something differnt.

I did what you mentioned on SortTags, but it does not change the number of albums.

MinimServer, even if a great tool, cannot compensate bad tagging; same as you can't do a good dish using bad ingredients, even if you are a great cook.

And you are right about my tagging strategy. Apart from being fully retired, when can I retag 6000+ albums, representing 93305 tracks ?
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28-02-2019, 12:02 (This post was last modified: 28-02-2019 15:01 by simbun.)
Post: #4
RE: Computation of number of albums ...
If different albums (remix vs original etc) with the same name (Album tag) reside in a single folder then I believe MinimServer will classify them as one (no matter what the other tags are).

If different albums are in separate folders then they'll be treated as individual albums unless one of them has a second DiscNumber, at which point they're ALL treated as one. However, if they have different AlbumArtists (or different Artists if there's no AlbumArtist) they should be treated seperately.


I have a very prescriptive tagging approach but I faced similar issues to you in that I had multiple values of album title (containing multiple discs). One example is the album 'Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band' where I had the 2009 Mono, the 2009 Stereo and the 2017 Super Deluxe Edition.
For me, I had other tags to distinguish between them:

Code:
ALBUM NAME                                BOXTITLE              RELEASE
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band     The Beatles
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band     The Beatles in Mono
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band                           Super Deluxe Edition

Whilst Minimsever allows you to modify how the tags look in the control point, the modifications are all after the logic that determines what an album is, and thus all these albums would have been merged together even if I had changed the displayFormat of album.
My solution was to use foobar2000 to create a new tag called ALBUMUNIQID using the formatted value: $crc32($meta(album artist)$meta(boxtitle)$meta(album)$meta(release)$meta(date)).
I then use this tag as "album" in MinimServer (by aliasTags:Album:inAlbum,ALBUMUNIQID:Album) and reformat the album tag to how I want it to look in the control point e.g. Album.displayFormat={$inAlbum^^^$boxtitle^ (from the boxset '^')^$release^ (^)^}. You will also need to modify the Album sort otherwise it will be sorted by the CRC values themselves e.g. Album.sortTags={+inAlbum}.


Your Paul Bley/Robert Cray albums should already be counted correctly as they appear in different folders - assuming proper AlbumArtist/Artist tags.

If the Original vs the Remix are in separate folders and have only a single disc each then they should appear individually, otherwise they'll be treated as one. If they're being treated as one but have a different release Date tag, you could use that in the computation of ALBUMUNIQID to force them apart.

Where you have flac vs SACD, I don't think MinimServer allows you to use #AudioQuality in tagFormats, and if you wanted to differentiate the albums by name e.g. 'Wish You Were Here (CD)' vs. 'Wish You Were Here (SACD)' (to get the album count correct), rather than by filter (using #AudioQuality as an indexTag) you'd need to have foobar2000 create a new tag. This could be based on attributes like the codec or channel count (https://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?ti...codec.25). Once you have that you could then follow the same approach as above.
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28-02-2019, 22:50
Post: #5
RE: Computation of number of albums ...
Why not name the albums like the following?:

Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (Stereo)
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (Mono)
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (Super Deluxe Edition)
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01-03-2019, 09:29
Post: #6
RE: Computation of number of albums ...
(28-02-2019 22:50)rompolompo Wrote:  Why not name the albums like the following?:

Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (Stereo)
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (Mono)
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (Super Deluxe Edition)

If you have more than one performance of a particular album I use the 'album artist' field to differentiate them by adding a date in brackets to the artist name.
e.g. Alfred Brendel (1971)

System: ALAC iTunes library on Synology DS412+ (running MinimServer) > Airport Extreme bridge > Optical isolation > dCS Network Bridge (controlled by Galaxy Tab S2 tablet running BubbleUPnP&Mosaic) > PS Audio DirectStream DAC > Primare A60 > Harbeth SHL5plus 40th Anniversary model
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01-03-2019, 09:45
Post: #7
RE: Computation of number of albums ...
(28-02-2019 22:50)rompolompo Wrote:  Why not name the albums like the following?:

Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (Stereo)
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (Mono)
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (Super Deluxe Edition)

Because that's not what the albums are called ;-)

With a tool like MinimServer that lets you customise the display of a tag, why would you find it necessary to add superflous information to the album name? I use something like:
tagFormat:Album.displayFormat={$Album^^^$boxtitle^ (from the boxset '^')^$release^ (^)^}

Admittedly I have to jump through a few hoops to achieve this as MinimServer wants to merge everything that has the same album name (in the raw tags), but for me it's worth it.
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01-03-2019, 09:49
Post: #8
RE: Computation of number of albums ...
(01-03-2019 09:29)DavidL Wrote:  If you have more than one performance of a particular album I use the 'album artist' field to differentiate them by adding a date in brackets to the artist name.
e.g. Alfred Brendel (1971)

In this particular example, the Mono and Stereo albums have the same release date and original release date, so that wouldn't help.
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01-03-2019, 15:30
Post: #9
RE: Computation of number of albums ...
Quote:- Two albums have the same name. Example:

6) Jazz/Paul Bley/1994 - Time Will Tell/
7) Pop Rock Folk Electro/Robert Cray/2003 - Time Will Tell/

Both album have the same title "Time Will Tell"

- Two version of the same album (original, and remix. Or flac versus SACD. Pink Floyd is very good at this game)
In the first case where there two albums with the same name but with a different albumArtist is this definently a problem I would have thought they would be kept seperate ?

In the second case, since you are trying to differentiate between two versions of the same album the sensible thing is to modify the album field accordingly, this is what I do
- Remix albums usually already have this as part of title anyway
- If a release is not an album I always add type information at the end e.g (E.P), (Single)
- Add [HD] for any high res albums
- Add Format name (Flac), (Wav) if I have the same album encode to different format.
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07-03-2019, 01:48 (This post was last modified: 07-03-2019 01:51 by lyapounov.)
Post: #10
RE: Computation of number of albums ...
Thanks all of you for your precious contributions.

Let me tell you another problem: Symphony n°1 is sometimes the album title.

Beethoven? Brahms ? Mahler ? Shostakovich ? etc...

OK, let us add the composer. So I need to correct the title to:
Beethoven - Symphony n°1

Agh: Barenboim ? Gardiner ? Haitink ? Karajan ? Paavo Järvi ??

OK, let us then add the conductor.

Beethoven - Symphony n°1, Karajan

Ah: Karajan 1951-1955 ? 1963 ? 1977 ?

OK, let us refine.

Beethoven - Symphony n°1, Karajan - 1963

Agh: the flac version, or the SACD ?

Beethoven - Symphony n°1, Karajan - 1963 (SACD)

Etc...
On 6000+ albums

(PS of course, there are often more than one symphony per CD. But this does not change the burden of retagging. And honestly, even the files which I buy on Qobuz have, many times, a very ugly tagging)
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