Searching for an artist

[DavidHB]

(08-05-2015 07:48)mightyoakbob Wrote:  I don't think I have ever touched indexTags because I have no understanding at all of what any of the tag boxes do and have only entered extra things in them when my understanding is that you have suggested I do that.

Actually, it's dead easy. Honest.

An index is just a sorted list of all the values in the various files for a particular Tab. So when we say that Artist is indexed, we mean that there is a sorted list of all the Artist entries, and you can use that list to look up the artist whose files you want to find. MinimServer needs to be told what tags you want to use in this way, and so has the indexTags property, where you list all the tags that you want to use when you are browsing. The list of your indexed tags (plus such things as [folder view]) is what you see when you are browsing your music collection in your Control Point.

The itemTags property is a list of tags that you don't want to be indexed (because you are not using them for lookup), but which are referenced in some way in the MinimServer properties, so that MinimServer needs to be told to keep track of them as well.

Apart from some special exceptions that don't concern us here, MinimServer ignores any tags that do not appear in either indexTags or itemTags. If your properties refer to a tag that is not listed in either of them, MinimServer will throw up an error, which is what has been happening in your case. So, if you want to refer to a tag in, for example, your tagFormat property, that tag must be listed in either indexTags or itemTags (but, of course, not both).

(08-05-2015 07:48)mightyoakbob Wrote:  What I have now is:

indexTags
=======
Artist, Date, Genre, All Artists, Composer, Conductor, Orchestra

itemTags
=======
<empty>

tagOptions
========
Album.sortTags={Album, Artist}

tagValue
======
<empty>
But I have been trying to enter Artist.default={AlbumArtist} in this tag box which is what I thought you wanted me to do but when I do this it always errors.

That's because you don't have AlbumArtist in either indexTags or itemTags, and it needs to be in one or the other, so that MinimServer knows to look it up for the Artist.default. Just insert 'AlbumArtist, ' (without the quotes) after 'All Artists, ' in your indexTags entry. Does that work?

David