thank you and some questions...

[simoncn]

(31-01-2012 10:16)psme Wrote:  Brute force browse the whole tree is a very poor option, because usually there are tons of repeated listing under multiple branches. If the library is very big, the initial browsing may take very long, and the controller may run out of system resource trying to store the whole list in multiple copies...

If the controller is really dumb about this (e.g., Windows Media Player) then that does happen. The controller should be able to be smart about seeing entries that it has already seen previously and not create duplicates.

Quote:That remind me about minimServer way of listing tracks of an album from a single artist, and also offer a entry of "list the whole album". It's a good feature when the user wants it. But sometimes I want to add all songs under a artist, by adding the artist "folder", which will add all songs under the artist. But in this case this "list the whole album" entry under a artist gets in the way and cause repeated entry to the playlist.

You can get repeated entries, but this isn't caused by the "Complete Album" feature, and the repeated entries shouldn't include any songs that aren't by the selected artist. I've designed the "Complete Album" feature in a way that should prevent any "other artist, same album" tracks from being selected. This is the purpose of the strange "Hide Contents" selection.

I see these duplicate entries myself, and they're created because the Artist name selection displays subcontainers for "xx items", "xx albums", and one or more tags. If the controller is dumb (see above), it creates duplicates for the contents of all these subcontainers.

I think the Search operation would allow the server to eliminate these duplicates, even if the control point is dumb. That's one of the reasons that I would like to add support for Search.

Quote:In the end, server side browsing really couldn't cut it. We need a smart controller which gets all the song and tag info from a server, then let user browses in their own customized way.

I don't quite agree with that. I think it's possible to go quite a long way with a server-side approach (and hopefully MinimServer is an example of what can be achieved), but it's true that further improvements would be possible if the controller and the server are working together. A simple example is for the controller to eliminate any duplicates sent by the server.

Simon