Questions re Database and Indexing

[Andre Gosselin]

(20-12-2013 12:16)winxi Wrote:  

(20-12-2013 11:20)LinAdmin Wrote:  b) Artists are in a comma separated list like "Brendel, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Levine" and (year) is optional.

Is there a possibility to configure the scanning process in such a way that the index of artists is not built by the combination of all entries as given in artist tag, but by making a separate entry for each of the constituents.

In the above example that file would become accessible via artist index of "Brendel", "Chicago Symphony Orchestra" or "Levine".

This would allow to easily see all entries for a specific artist or orchestra without creating individual tags.

It's not possible with MinimServer to automatically separate multiple artists which are summarized in a single tag. There would be quite a lot of problems with this approach, the most obvious being that there is no standard for separating the artists in a single tag (some may use a comma, others may use a slash).

The remommended way to get each single artist in the index is to create a single ARTIST tag for each artist. For example, your single ARTIST tag "Brendel, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Levine" should be split into three ARTIST tags. You can quite easily achieve this with a software like MP3tag.
Please note that you then still can configure MinimServer to send the full string "Brendel, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Levine" to the control point by using the displayFormat property.

I think I disagree with what has just been said about the possibility of separately indexing artist names listed together in a single ARTIST tag. In fact, you can!

I have numerous tracks where the ARTIST tag holds many artist names separated by semi-colons (eg "ARTIST=Brendel, Alfred; Chicago Symphony Orchestra; Levine, James"). In minimserver config, "All Artists" is included inside the "indexTags" property. Each artist is then listed individually in the minimserver browse tree under the "All Artists" index. This has been tested with many control points (BubbleUPnP, UPnPlay, MediaHouse among them).

Setting ARTIST tag to a semi-colon separated list of artist names is a convention used by other music servers (like MediaMonkey, Foobar2000). MinimServer does the same. This convention allows a much more natural and convenient way to handle a long artist list than entering one ARTIST tag for each individual artist.

I am not sure however if the same result can be achieved if comma-separated (as opposed to semicolon-separated) lists of artist names are used. Changing commas for semicolons inside tags over a selection of tracks can be easily done using the MediaMonkey regexp extension. Other tools should exist to achieve the same task.

Regards