Custom tag based on #AudioChannels

[Veganfloyd]

Hi, would it be possible to have a custom tag to filter by that would dichotomize the selection of files by the number of channels (as determined by #AudioChannels) to (i.) mono or stereo and (ii.) >2 channels? If so, how can I set this up? I would still want to keep the #AudioChannels tag as a separate one.

[simoncn]

You can use a tag update file to do this. Here is an example:

@#AUDIOCHANNELS=1
@#AUDIOCHANNELS=2
+MULTICHANNEL=false
@#AUDIOCHANNELS=5.1
+MULTICHANNEL=true

[Veganfloyd]

Thank you. Unfortunately, this does nothing for me. I created a tagUpdate.txt file with your code pasted in. I saved it to my Synology NAS and copy-pasted its location/name (/volume1/music2/tagUpdate.txt) from file properties to tagUpdate in the Advanced Properties tab. I re-scanned, re-started my control point (HiFi cast) and nothing changed in the view of my library.

[simoncn]

You also need to add MultiChannel to indexTags if you want to see it in the index.

[Veganfloyd]

Thank you, Simon! Works like a charm.

I have some dts-cds ripped to dts flac files that I would ideally like to be also captured as multichannel, though they are technically 2 channel (being not decoded). Is there any way around this? I am not sure if Minimserver has a way of telling them apart from regular flac files. If not, I would not mind encoding them to pure dts and have all dts files captured by the multichannel tag as true. If either or both would be possible, I would appreciate spelling out the extra rules for me to add to the tag update file.

[simoncn]

MinimServer goes by what the FLAC file encoding says. To recognise these files as multichannel, you would need to encode them as multichannel in the FLAC file. Your other option is to leave these files as encoded as 2-channel and add an explicit MutliChannel tag to each file.

In either case, no change to the tag update file is needed.

[Veganfloyd]

Hi Simon. Thanks and apologies for my late reply, I only had the time to look into this now. Would it not be possible to add the MutliChannel tag just to the 2-channel DTS files, rather than all files in my library, and then add a rule based on the MutliChannel tag to the above tagUpdate file?

[simoncn]

I think you would need to take a slightly different approach. With only your DTS FLAC files tagged as MULTICHANNEL=true, your tag update file could contain

@#AUDIOCHANNELS=5.1
+MULTICHANNEL=true

and you could set the tagValue property to:

MultiChannel.default={'false'}

[Veganfloyd]

Woohoo! This works great. Thank you, Simon.