New to Minimserver - a few questions

[simoncn]

(12-07-2013 11:42)realmassy Wrote:  Can i have something like this with MinimServer? In MinimServer I've have to choose the 'Genre' folder under 'Composer' to display all the genres for examples, which makes the browsing a bit 'convoluted'

(14-07-2013 07:34)Oliviander Wrote:  Hi Simon,
I think you didn't get what realmassy is really looking for.
I think he has the same concern about minimserver that I
had mentionened in my feature proposal of a quickselect path in March:

It seems that my original reply didn't address the OP's request to be able to use a predefined browsing path.

I had some requests for this in the early days of MinimServer, specifically for the case of Artist/Album browsing, which takes one more click with MinimServer than with some other servers (Artist -> artist name -> Album -> album name instead of Artist/Album -> artist name -> album name).

I think this could be added fairly easily by extending indexTags to allow browsing paths as well as single index entries. For example, if indexTags contains the value Artist/Album, this would add the above Artist/Album "quick select" path alongside other index entries.

This is fairly simple to understand and not too difficult to implement, but it doesn't fully satisfy the OP's request, for two reasons:

1) The request is for a longer path: Composer/Genre/Work Title/ArtistWithYear (sorry, but I don't quite understand how the Grouping custom tag comes into play). This longer path would be cumbersome to display in a control point with limited screen size, so some kind of aliasing capability would be needed, such as Classical={Composer/Genre/Work Title/ArtistWithYear}.

2) ArtistWithYear is a combination of values from two different tags (Artist and Date), so this would need an enhancement to the tagFormat property to allow combination index tags to be defined. For example, this combination could be specified as ArtistWithYear.indexFormat={$artist^$date.index^, } together with the tagOptions setting Date.indexValue.yearOnly. This seems like a significant increase in complexity.

Given that something like this is possible, the question is whether the reduction in the number of browsing steps would be worth the extra complexity of adding these new mechanisms. Another question is whether the work needed to support this should take priority over other requested enhancements such as UPnP search, a "recently added" playlist, and automatic rescanning for newly added music. I would welcome any feedback on this.