Groups and multidisc albums

[swdick]

I use the Group.default={Composition} trick to see Compositions as separate items on an Album (and not the tracks). Works perfectly, except when the composition is on multiple discs.
I use , disc<n> extension after the Album title. The log shows 2 types of errors:
Error: group spans multiple discs:
Error: group contains tracks that aren't consecutive:

Do I have to create a seperate Group tag by hand to every disc of the compostion?
I read the instructions but the explanation is beyond me.

[simoncn]

Groups are a structural containment concept and Compositions (or Works) are part of metadata.

The containment structure used by MinimServer is

Album > Disc > Group > Track

Because of this, a group cannot span discs. It would be possible for MinimServer to automatically split a group that spans discs into two groups, one for each disc. This seems lke the best option and this change is planned for a future version fo MinimServer.

Also, a group cannot contain non-consecutuve tracks because it would then need to contain all the other tracks between them. Again, it would be possible for MinimServer to automatically split the group into separate groups although this might result in a number of groups that contain only one track.

At present, MinimServer is producing an error mesage in both these cases and ignoring the GROUP tag. The tracks are still being read but are not shown as part of a group. There is no need to make any changes to your tagging.

[swdick]

So I gather that the errormessage has no consequence?

I tried this on a small scale: format Group as %album% (for multidisc albums) . This includes the , disc <n> suffix.
No more errormessages!

[simoncn]

The consequence is that some files you have asked to be grouped have not been grouped. It should probably be a warning rather than an error.

Including the disc number in the group name will remove the error for groups that span discs because you are now creating a separate group for each disc. I would not expect this to remove the error for tracks that are not consecutive.

[swdick]

Thanks for your answer.
You're right about the non consecutive tracks of course.
On this last point I checked a number of discs and can't find anything wrong with them. They all have tracknumbers that have no gaps.
Some discs I renumbered the tracks with the tool in Mp3tags. Can this be the cause of the error?

[simoncn]

MinimServer goes by the TRACKNUMBER tag, not the track title or filename. Have you checked these tags in Mp3tag?

[swdick]

I seem to have had a misconception: the point is that the composition has non consecutive tracks.
This is partly a problem causes by differences in the exact name of the composition, sometimes by the fact that a composition is mixed with other works.

[simoncn]

It is fine (and fairly common) for a composition to have non-consecutive tracks. This will not produce an error message. The problem occurs when you try to create a group with non-consecutive tracks.

For example, suppose you have an album with 9 tracks and you try to tag tracks 2, 4 and 6 as a group. This is a problem because either the group would also need to contain tracks 3 and 5 or the order of tracks would need to change to become 1, [2, 4, 6], 3, 5, 7, 8, 9. I have used [ ] to represent the group.

[swdick]

Yes, I understand your point.
I used the composition as it is de default for Group in my system.

[stefano_mbp]

I would like to share my experience on this topic.
I was also looking for a solution to use the Group tag but the constraint of conscutive tracks was more harmful than anything else.
It was enough for me to have the list of compositions under the Album.
Unfortunately, the Album tag is always treated as the last level of searches, so you can only see the tracks, then I came up with the idea of defining another tag that contained the value of the Album.
I therefore defined in tagValue the new tag as
Album/Work.default = {Album}
and in indextags I added Album/Work tag
With great pleasure I was therefore able to verify that it was possible to go down other levels under this new tag, in particular (I use the Works tag for compositions) the Works tag appears and below this all the Works of the album are listed, under this you can find the tracks
NB the tag Works is a new defined tag, it is not Work tag
Obviously this trick works if there are at least two Works in the album (I set the value of listviewalbums = 0, but = 1 nothing changes)
Maybe this solution is so elegant as using Group tag but it works fine