The '<n> albums' sort order (again)

[DavidHB]

This is less of a feature request than a question as to how much of what I want MinimServer can, or will in future be able to, provide. The starting point is Simon's most interesting post #2 in this thread, and the first question is therefore how close is he to implementing the proposed features described therein? The concepts he described make a great deal of sense to me, and I'd like to express support for and encouragement of his plans as he described them.

My experiments with networked music so far indicate that, while the various indexes will all be useful on occasion, the view I would most often like to work with is one derived from the way I arrange my CDs on their shelves. The first categorisation in my (mainly classical) collection is by broad genre (classical, jazz, folk, pop etc.). Within that, the classical albums are ordered by composer surname and album title or contents, and the remaining genres are ordered by artist and album. Classical recitals and compilations are ordered separately. From looking at other people's record and CD collections, I'd guess that schemes of this kind are quite widely used.

It seems to me that Simon's proposed features would probably take care of what for me would be the default Genre-Composer-Album sort order. I'd hope that MinimServer would expect composer tag data to be ordered naturally ('Edward Elgar', not 'Elgar, Edward'), as that is how the information is usually delivered by online tagging databases. MinimServer would then have its rules for defining the sort order, apart from the inevitable exceptions ('Beethoven, Ludwig van' versus 'Vaughan Williams, Ralph' etc.). It seems fair to assume that, if MinimServer has done the grunt work, users should handle the exceptions.

In the thread referred to above, I think that the idea was that, if data is present in a ComposerSort tag (or field, if you prefer MP3Tag terminology), this data, as is, would become the sort data; otherwise, MinimServer would derive the sort data using the sort value of the Composer tag (the discussion was about Artist tags, but I assume that Composer could be treated similarly).

Am I correct in thinking that if/when Simon's proposed features are implemented, MinimServer will be able to do everything that I have described so far?

The next issue is what to do for genres other than classical, where the sort order should be Genre-AlbumArtist-Album. Simon has, if I recall correctly, set his face firmly against the use of conditionals in the creation of MinimServer indexes, and, as I want to host the whole of the server side operation on my NAS, I am not fond of the idea of running multiple instances of MinimServer. The only way round the problem I see at present is to copy the AlbumArtist data to Composer (and, if appropriate, with format changes to ComposerSort). It's a kludge that some people would not like, but with fewer than 100 albums in my collection affected in this way (in many of which the Album Artist is actually the composer), I can live with the compromise. The batch copying and formatting processes are quick and easy in MP3Tag (I've already tested the concept), so implementation is not a problem.

If I have understood things correctly, it all gets more difficult with alphabetical groupings, because the first term of my sort order is Genre, and there are far too few of those, and far too many entries within each, for alphabetical groupings to work. Would it be possible, at least for [album], to have an option to make the second rather than the first term of the sort order the point at which the grouping is made? The alphabetical list in my album sort order could then display as:

Classical A
...
Classical Z
Folk A
...
Folk Z
Jazz A
...
Jazz Z
and so on.

For me (and I hope for others too), this a neat and orderly way to look at the collection as whole; it makes it rather like browsing the actual library shelves ...

Thanks again to Simon for a splendid piece of software. I've now been using it extensively for 10 days, and I haven't broken it yet, which is something of a record for me. With MinimServer, I am now confident that my network music infrastructure is sufficiently robust to justify the purchase of an expensive renderer/player to get the best out of the system.

David