"AlbumDuration"

[woldejans]

Hello folks,

I know the feature "AudioDuration". But is there also an index that shows the total time of a complete album?

Willem.

[simoncn]

There is no setting in MinimServer to obtain this information.

[woldejans]

That's a pity. But thanks for the answer.

[muesli]

Any chance to put this on the feature request list? Unfortunately the Naim app doesn't calculate the album duration like BubbleUPNP does, nut Bubble doesn't work well with my Naim streamer (pause and seek mode don't work). So I would love this feature being implemented in a future version of MinimServer.
But independent from this request: thanks for your great work Simon!

[simoncn]

I have loooked at what it would take to implement support for this.

At present, all special tags (such as #AudioFormat, #AudioDuration, etc.) are specific to a single track and are added to the track metadata while the track is being read. This can't be done for album duration because this requires all tracks of the album to be located. At the point where MinimServer can be sure that all tracks for the album have been located, it is too late to add more tags to the album files.

It might be possible to work around this but this would require creating a significant amount of complex code that is only used for this specific situation. For this reason, it is unlikely that this will be supported in MinimServer.

[muesli]

Thank you Simon for having looked onto this. It's a pity that it's too hard to support this, but also without this feature MinimServer is the best

[paultaylor]

I guess you could create such a field in a manual tag editor and fill in the value yourself, if you create such a field you could also probably use some scripting mechanism to calculate the album duration automatically from the duration of the tracks making up the album, then you could just use modify MinimServer configuration to use this new field.

I am interested, what would you actually use this field for?

[muesli]

(10-04-2021 17:11)paultaylor Wrote:  I am interested, what would you actually use this field for?

Sometimes when I have e.g. one hour until I have to leave, I would like if an album I choose to hear fits into this hour...

[simoncn]

I have thought about this some more and I can see a possible way to do this that might not be too difficult or costly. If I am able to implement this, I will post back here.

[lyapounov]

This raises the question of what is an album.

My understanding (and I may be wrong) is that for minimserver an album is a set of tracks whose tag Album is the same, wherever they are on the hard drive. Is this correct ?

For me, an album is a set of tracks which are in the same folder, with no folder beyond, and hopefully do have the same Album tag (which is the case for 100% of my albums)

In that case, that would explain why my database says that I have 8017 albums, while minimserver through my renderer says 7821 albums; because I still have multiple albums (in my definition) which share a same album tag.

As everything is in my database, I have absolutely no issue to know what is the length of an album, as I have the length of every track. My duty so far is to write a controller which taps in my database and believes it more than all my tags; but I need time... :-)