"Virtually" Splitting Albums

[3395]

I mostly listen to soundtracks, and many of these from the movie realm come with bonus tracks. Now, I don't really want to listen to those normally, so I tagged my audio files with Group where needed. That works perfectly in MinimServer -- as long as the soundtrack itself and the bonus tracks are contiguous blocks. It "fails" otherwise. For example, "How to Train Your Dragon (The Deluxe Edition)" is laid out like this:

Code:

1.1:        Bonus Tracks
1.2 - 2.8:  Soundtrack
2.9 - 2.17: Bonus Tracks

In this case, only the "Soundtrack" group is displayed as a group beneath the Album, but not the "Bonus Tracks" group. I guess, what I could do, would be to add a suffix to all contiguous groups, e.g. "Bonus Tracks 1", "Bonus Tracks 2", and so on. But this isn't really nice.

I also tried a reverse approach: I added Group to the Index Tags, and then I jumped in via Group > Original Soundtrack. Also not very nice, because I have to jump all the way back up if I want to listen to a soundtrack which isn't tagged with Group due to a lack of bonus tracks. And there's another problem, because if the soundtrack in question has contiguous blocks of tracks, I can end up with such a browse tree:

Code:

(servers)> MinimServer[ds220plus]> Group> Original Soundtrack> 14 albums> The Abyss (The Deluxe Edition)> Original Soundtrack

So, my other idea was to "virtually" rewrite the Album tag to include the value of the Group tag, so that I would end up with two Albums in the Album list:

Code:

How to Train Your Dragon (The Deluxe Edition), Bonus Tracks
How to Train Your Dragon (The Deluxe Edition), Soundtrack

I tried playing around with tagFormat, but using Album.displayFormat={$Album$Group} only had the effect of displaying a single Album item with all values of the Group tag included.

Is what I want somehow achievable without physically splitting the Album in two by rewriting the Album tag on the files?

[stefano_mbp]

You could try to use DISCSUBTITLE tag as described here
This is mostly used for box sets but works fine in your example too, you need to renumber discs and tracks according to DISCSUBTITLE tag where each DISCSUBTITLE must be assigner to each “disc”.
In your example it should be:
1.1 Bonus tracks
2.1-2.x Soundtrack
3.1-3.8 Bonus tracks

[simbun]

(08-08-2023 05:53)3395 Wrote:  So, my other idea was to "virtually" rewrite the Album tag to include the value of the Group tag, so that I would end up with two Albums in the Album list:

Code:

How to Train Your Dragon (The Deluxe Edition), Bonus Tracks
How to Train Your Dragon (The Deluxe Edition), Soundtrack

I tried playing around with tagFormat, but using Album.displayFormat={$Album$Group} only had the effect of displaying a single Album item with all values of the Group tag included.

.displayFormat is only evaluated when browsing, so is not relavant to album grouping.

With MinimServer, the most difficult task is deciding how you want it to look

The one overriding rule I have is to keep my tags accurate as it can cause too many complications downstream e.g. CUETools/PerfectTunes verification or tagging software being album to identify the album. This is where tagUpdate comes to the rescue, as it enables you to modify your tag values but only within the scope of MinimServer.

So, if you wanted to split them into different albums you could write something like:

Code:

@ALBUM=How to Train Your Dragon (The Deluxe Edition)
&TRACKNUMBER=01
=ALBUM=How to Train Your Dragon (The Deluxe Edition), Bonus Tracks
&TRACKNUMBER=02
=ALBUM=How to Train Your Dragon (The Deluxe Edition), Soundtrack
&TRACKNUMBER=03
=ALBUM=How to Train Your Dragon (The Deluxe Edition), Soundtrack
...

If you wanted to rename Groups you could use:

Code:

@GROUP=Bonus Tracks
&ALBUM=How to Train Your Dragon (The Deluxe Edition)
&TRACKNUMBER=01
=GROUP=Bonus Tracks 1
...

One thing I do to groups (in an automated way) that would also work - rather than just suffix the Group with 1,2,3 - is add the trackNumber/range to Group. I do this because I have releases where some of the tracks are contained in Groups but some aren't, and my control point shows trackNumber next to the track titles so it looks a little disjointed. Yours would look something like:

Code:

1.    Bonus Tracks
2-8.  Soundtrack
9-17. Bonus Tracks

Split out into separate discs and use DiscSubtitle e.t.c.

Alternatively, if you wanted to exclude them completely from MinimServer indexing (I use this for one album that has a LOT of silent tracks as well as my non decoded disc rips that contain HDCD or Pre-Emphasis) you could make use of:

Code:

excludePattern: *.silent.flac, *.hdcd.flac, *.pre.flac

So, if you can determine how you'd like to treat them there's almost certainly a way to achieve it.

[simoncn]

At present, MinimServer doesn't allow a group to contain tracks that either don't have consecutive track numbers or span an album disc boundary, for example:

Example 1:
track 1 in group A
track 2 in group A
track 3 (not in a group)
track 4 in group A
...other tracks

Example 2:
...other tracks in disc 1
disc 1, track 10 in group B (the last track on disc 1)
disc 2, track 1 in group B (the first track on disc 2)
...other tracks on disc 2

In both these cases, the group identity is removed from all tracks in the group and a warning message is shown in the MinimServer log.

There have been requests for this situation to be handled by preserving the group identity and creating separate groups (with the same name) for eack block of noncontiguous tracks. With this approach, the item list for example 1 would be:

A
track 3
A
...other tracks

and for example 2 would be

(Disc 1)
...other tracks
B

(Disc 2)
B
...other tracks

I am working on implementing this change in the next MinimServer update.