A couple of queries from a Newbie.

[Pastim]

I have only just discovered MinimServer. What a great piece of software! I got the server installed on my Vortexbox and MinimWatch on my desktop in no time. Most importantly it even supports bespoke tags, which is essential for my classical collection.

I have been trying to avoid UPnP having had grim experiences in the past with various bits of incompatible kit and software. However, MinimServer makes it almost usable as my premier playing method, except for a few puzzles. Forgive me if they have been answered elsewhere already. I have looked.

1. I have multiple renderers. One can process 192Khz flacs/wavs, one can't. Is there any chance the transcoding might in future include 'downgrading' where necessary?

2. I cannot get the multiTag feature to work for Genre or Artist. For Genre and Artist the multiple values are always split (so even if I enter

Code:

-Genre.display.multiTag

they are still split). However, I don't know if this being done by MinimServer or my Controller (leia or foobar2000) and/or Renderers. What am I missing?

3. The multiple AlbumArtist issue, which I see has been done to death on these pages, is something of a pain. I currently use Squeezebox (LMS) and foobar2000 as players. Both of these allow me to use the tags I have set up (using puddletag) as below:

- The premier artists on all tracks in the Album: the AlbumArtist
- The premier artists on all tracks (movements) in a (classical) Work (a bespoke tag): the WorkArtist (includes the above)
- All artists on each track: Artist (includes the above)

When searching I use whichever is appropriate to what I want to find, and I do use each of them from time to time.

However, with MinimServer I get:

- errors on the log (as expected) for multiple AlbumArtists x and y
- the multiple AlbumArtist entries are both missing from the AlbumArtist index
- the combined AlbumArtist entries (separated by a comma, as x, y) are present in the Artist index
- the individual entries duplicated in AlbumArtist and Artist are not present in the Artist index

This combination is very confusing, since I have have lost the individual entries in Artist and the entries in AlbumArtist. Luckily for classical I can fall back on WorkArtist, but the combination of what works and what doesn't is difficult to work with. I appreciate that multiple AlbumArtist tags may give processing headaches, but I was hoping that they might get combined (x, y) just under the AlbumArtist index, and that it would then be possible to treat the combination as one of the items identifying the whole Album. I don't want to give up on my tagging scheme since it works well elsewhere.

Is there another solution?

[Oliviander]

(08-12-2013 23:34)Pastim Wrote:  3. The multiple AlbumArtist issue, which I see has been done to death on these pages, is something of a pain. I currently use Squeezebox (LMS) and foobar2000 as players. Both of these allow me to use the tags I have set up (using puddletag) as below:

- The premier artists on all tracks in the Album: the AlbumArtist
- The premier artists on all tracks (movements) in a (classical) Work (a bespoke tag): the WorkArtist (includes the above)
- All artists on each track: Artist (includes the above)

When searching I use whichever is appropriate to what I want to find, and I do use each of them from time to time.

However, with MinimServer I get:

- errors on the log (as expected) for multiple AlbumArtists x and y
- the multiple AlbumArtist entries are both missing from the AlbumArtist index
- the combined AlbumArtist entries (separated by a comma, as x, y) are present in the Artist index
- the individual entries duplicated in AlbumArtist and Artist are not present in the Artist index

This combination is very confusing, since I have have lost the individual entries in Artist and the entries in AlbumArtist. Luckily for classical I can fall back on WorkArtist, but the combination of what works and what doesn't is difficult to work with. I appreciate that multiple AlbumArtist tags may give processing headaches, but I was hoping that they might get combined (x, y) just under the AlbumArtist index, and that it would then be possible to treat the combination as one of the items identifying the whole Album. I don't want to give up on my tagging scheme since it works well elsewhere.

Is there another solution?

I'm not sure as I resolved the Problem for me
by Aliasing the Album Artist to nil
(Entry in Properties Alias ALBUMARTIST:nil)
and not using it at all

(caution:
--> Maybe there are some Problems resulting with the album aritst missing
in the combination of Tracks to albums if you don't have them in
one Folder --> See manual Albums and Folders)

But you should also be able to redirect
your ALBUMARTIST to any Custom named Tag
Which doesn't have these limitations
and Add it to the index entry
(haven't tried it yet)

Like

ALias: ALBUMARTIST:ALBUM_ARTIST
Index: ALBUM_ARTIST

So you should get an searchable ALBUM_ARTIST index entry

[simoncn]

(08-12-2013 23:34)Pastim Wrote:  I have only just discovered MinimServer. What a great piece of software! I got the server installed on my Vortexbox and MinimWatch on my desktop in no time. Most importantly it even supports bespoke tags, which is essential for my classical collection.

Thanks very much!

Quote:I have been trying to avoid UPnP having had grim experiences in the past with various bits of incompatible kit and software. However, MinimServer makes it almost usable as my premier playing method, except for a few puzzles. Forgive me if they have been answered elsewhere already. I have looked.

1. I have multiple renderers. One can process 192Khz flacs/wavs, one can't. Is there any chance the transcoding might in future include 'downgrading' where necessary?

In theory, it is possible for this to be supported. In practice, it would be a lot of work to implement, and I don't think it will happen any time soon. I will add it to the list of requested future enhancements.

Quote:2. I cannot get the multiTag feature to work for Genre or Artist. For Genre and Artist the multiple values are always split (so even if I enter

Code:

-Genre.display.multiTag

they are still split). However, I don't know if this being done by MinimServer or my Controller (leia or foobar2000) and/or Renderers. What am I missing?

What exactly is the problem (split?) that you are trying to solve, and why do you think the multiTag setting is the way to solve it? I suspect you may have misunderstood the intended use of multiTag.

Quote:3. The multiple AlbumArtist issue, which I see has been done to death on these pages, is something of a pain. I currently use Squeezebox (LMS) and foobar2000 as players. Both of these allow me to use the tags I have set up (using puddletag) as below:

- The premier artists on all tracks in the Album: the AlbumArtist
- The premier artists on all tracks (movements) in a (classical) Work (a bespoke tag): the WorkArtist (includes the above)
- All artists on each track: Artist (includes the above)

When searching I use whichever is appropriate to what I want to find, and I do use each of them from time to time.

However, with MinimServer I get:

- errors on the log (as expected) for multiple AlbumArtists x and y
- the multiple AlbumArtist entries are both missing from the AlbumArtist index

The above is as expected.

Quote:- the combined AlbumArtist entries (separated by a comma, as x, y) are present in the Artist index

This should happen for Artist entries, but not for ignored AlbumArtist entires. Perhaps you are seeing this for ignored AlbumArtist entries that are duplicated as Artist entries.

Quote:- the individual entries duplicated in AlbumArtist and Artist are not present in the Artist index

You will find all the individual Artist entries in the All Artists index.

Quote:This combination is very confusing, since I have have lost the individual entries in Artist and the entries in AlbumArtist.

The Artist index entry for an album is the AlbumArtist value if this is present and valid. If there is no valid AlbumArtist, the Artist index value is determined by the Artist.indexValue setting, which defaults to a comma-separated list of Artist values if not specified explicitly.

Quote:Luckily for classical I can fall back on WorkArtist, but the combination of what works and what doesn't is difficult to work with. I appreciate that multiple AlbumArtist tags may give processing headaches, but I was hoping that they might get combined (x, y) just under the AlbumArtist index, and that it would then be possible to treat the combination as one of the items identifying the whole Album. I don't want to give up on my tagging scheme since it works well elsewhere.

Is there another solution?

You can use aliasTags to "rename" your AlbumArtist tags to something else such as MainArtist. There is no problem with having multiple MainArtist values, so this will eliminate the warnings and ignored tags.

You can also rename the MainArtist index back to AlbumArtist for display purposes. This is getting close to what you want.

You can also use the Artist.indexValue setting to customize the value in the Artist index to be a combination of MainArtist and Artist values.

The above settings might not give you exactly what you want, but they should enable you to get closer to this than you are at present.

After the next release is out, I will spend a bit of time thinking about whether this area can be made a bit more flexible and less confusing.

[Pastim]

Thanks very much for your rapid and comprehensive reply.

Quote:What exactly is the problem (split?) that you are trying to solve, and why do you think the multiTag setting is the way to solve it? I suspect you may have misunderstood the intended use of multiTag.

My understanding of the purpose of multiTag is that if enabled, multi-value tags are listed separately in the index, and if disabled they are combined (by default separated by a comma). Is that wrong? I have Classical as the 1st of 2 tags for all Classical genres. I was therefore trying this to see whether I could get 'Classical, Violin Concerto' and so on, rather than separate Classical and Violin Concerto lines. Similarly I was trying to test the effect on Artist etc.

Quote:You can use aliasTags to "rename" your AlbumArtist tags to something else such as MainArtist. There is no problem with having multiple MainArtist values, so this will eliminate the warnings and ignored tags.

You can also rename the MainArtist index back to AlbumArtist for display purposes. This is getting close to what you want.

Using your MainArtist trick solves most of my issues. In fact, it resolves another puzzle, but creates one more.

Many of my tracks have many multiple Artist tags (who were not all included in the AlbumArtist tags). Previously these were not showing as a string of comma-separated items (a, b, c, d, e...) under the Artist index. When I implemented the MainArtist Alias, they all appeared, comma-separated. When I try to stop them being comma-separated by specifying all.display.multiTag, I still get them comma-separated. Is this an unexpected 'feature' caused by trying to use multiple AlbumArtist tags and breaking something else?

Quote:You can also use the Artist.indexValue setting to customize the value in the Artist index to be a combination of MainArtist and Artist values.

You've lost me there. Where do I set .indexValue?

Quote:- the combined AlbumArtist entries (separated by a comma, as x, y) are present in the Artist index ......

In my flacs, the multiple AlbumArtist values (x, y) are also deliberately included in the Artist tags.

However, in MinimServer my Artist index did not show the individual x or y entries. All I see is 'x, y' under Artist. This does to seem to be what you expected me to see, and is somewhat puzzling. Using the MainArtist alias resolves this for the MainArtist index, but under Artist I still only get x, y rather than separate x and y.

All in all, I'm much closer to what I need now. This is by far the best server I have found on linux.

All I need now is a really good but skinny controller. Kinsky is hopeless on linux, most others don't run at all on linux, so foobar under Wine is a slightly heavyweight but reliable solution and leia a lightweight but flaky one.

[simoncn]

(09-12-2013 10:10)Pastim Wrote:  My understanding of the purpose of multiTag is that if enabled, multi-value tags are listed separately in the index, and if disabled they are combined (by default separated by a comma). Is that wrong? I have Classical as the 1st of 2 tags for all Classical genres. I was therefore trying this to see whether I could get 'Classical, Violin Concerto' and so on, rather than separate Classical and Violin Concerto lines. Similarly I was trying to test the effect on Artist etc.

The multiTag setting is used for a different purpose, which isn't applicable to your usage of MinimServer.

It isn't possible to change the way multiple values of the same tag are presented in the index, except for the special case of Artist. For the Artist index, you can use the Artist.indexValue setting to do this. This is described in this section of the User guide.

Quote:Many of my tracks have many multiple Artist tags (who were not all included in the AlbumArtist tags). Previously these were not showing as a string of comma-separated items (a, b, c, d, e...) under the Artist index. When I implemented the MainArtist Alias, they all appeared, comma-separated. When I try to stop them being comma-separated by specifying all.display.multiTag, I still get them comma-separated. Is this an unexpected 'feature' caused by trying to use multiple AlbumArtist tags and breaking something else?

The multiTag setting is used for a different purpose (see above).

To see the artists individually, you can use the All Artists index. If this this isn't already in your indexTags property setting, you need to add it there and restart MinimServer.

Quote:You've lost me there. Where do I set .indexValue?

See above.

Quote:However, in MinimServer my Artist index did not show the individual x or y entries. All I see is 'x, y' under Artist. This does to seem to be what you expected me to see, and is somewhat puzzling. Using the MainArtist alias resolves this for the MainArtist index, but under Artist I still only get x, y rather than separate x and y.

To see the artists individually, you can use the All Artists index (see above).

[winxi]

(09-12-2013 11:32)simoncn Wrote:  It isn't possible to change the way multiple values of the same tag are presented in the index, except for the special case of Artist. For the Artist index, you can use the Artist.indexValue setting to do this. This is described in this section of the User guide.

It may be a misunderstanding, but I think you mean the Artist.indexFormat property.

[Pastim]

(09-12-2013 12:56)winxi Wrote:  

(09-12-2013 11:32)simoncn Wrote:  It isn't possible to change the way multiple values of the same tag are presented in the index, except for the special case of Artist. For the Artist index, you can use the Artist.indexValue setting to do this. This is described in this section of the User guide.

It may be a misunderstanding, but I think you mean the Artist.indexFormat property.

I was just about to respond that I must be dim because I don't understand how to use the Artist.indexValue property from the description in the user guide. If indexFormat is indeed what was meant then that makes a bit more sense to me, but is it possible to get the index entries separated out individually, or can I only change the separator between them?

I'd also like to ask what 'All Artist' really means. In the user guide is says "...complete artist information It contains Artist tag values only, not AlbumArtist tag values". Is the word 'complete' meant to imply that other 'artists', such as composers and conductors etc are included, or is that dependent on the entry below?

Code:

Artist.displayFormat={$artist$orchestra$conductor}

I also note that neither BAND nor ORCHESTRA is listed in the common FLAC tag list under 'Tag Mappings'. Is that intentional? BAND in particular is fairly standard is it not (I have used it and put in a alias to ORCHESTRA)?

[simoncn]

(09-12-2013 12:56)winxi Wrote:  It may be a misunderstanding, but I think you mean the Artist.indexFormat property.

My apologies. I meant to say indexFormat, not indexValue.

(09-12-2013 15:05)Pastim Wrote:  I was just about to respond that I must be dim because I don't understand how to use the Artist.indexValue property from the description in the user guide. If indexFormat is indeed what was meant then that makes a bit more sense to me, but is it possible to get the index entries separated out individually, or can I only change the separator between them?

In the Artist index, there is a single index entry for each album. It isn't possible to create more than one Artist index entry for the same album. For files that aren't in an album, it isn't possible to create more than one Artist index entry for each file.

This rule applies specifically to the Artist tag and not to other tags.

Quote:
I'd also like to ask what 'All Artist' really means. In the user guide is says "...complete artist information It contains Artist tag values only, not AlbumArtist tag values". Is the word 'complete' meant to imply that other 'artists', such as composers and conductors etc are included, or is that dependent on the entry below?

Code:

Artist.displayFormat={$artist$orchestra$conductor}

The displayFormat setting controls what is sent to the control point for display. It doesn't affect what appears in the index.

The All Artists index contains all the Artist tags from all the files in your library. This is the meaning of 'complete'. Unlike the Artist index (which can contain a mixture of Artist tag information and AlbumArtist tag information), the All Artists index contains Artist tag information only.

Quote:I also note that neither BAND nor ORCHESTRA is listed in the common FLAC tag list under 'Tag Mappings'. Is that intentional? BAND in particular is fairly standard is it not (I have used it and put in a alias to ORCHESTRA)?

This is intentional. Any tags not listed in the mappings can be used in your files and read by MinimServer, so there is no problem with using BAND or ORCHESTRA tags in your files. These tags aren't in the list of mappings because they would appear "as is" in FLAC/Vorbis, ID3v2 and iTunes tags and therefore don't need any special mapping treatment.

[Pastim]

(10-12-2013 13:10)simoncn Wrote:  

(09-12-2013 12:56)winxi Wrote:  It may be a misunderstanding, but I think you mean the Artist.indexFormat property.

My apologies. I meant to say indexFormat, not indexValue.

(09-12-2013 15:05)Pastim Wrote:  I was just about to respond that I must be dim because I don't understand how to use the Artist.indexValue property from the description in the user guide. If indexFormat is indeed what was meant then that makes a bit more sense to me, but is it possible to get the index entries separated out individually, or can I only change the separator between them?

In the Artist index, there is a single index entry for each album. It isn't possible to create more than one Artist index entry for the same album. For files that aren't in an album, it isn't possible to create more than one Artist index entry for each file.

This rule applies specifically to the Artist tag and not to other tags.

Quote:
I'd also like to ask what 'All Artist' really means. In the user guide is says "...complete artist information It contains Artist tag values only, not AlbumArtist tag values". Is the word 'complete' meant to imply that other 'artists', such as composers and conductors etc are included, or is that dependent on the entry below?

Code:

Artist.displayFormat={$artist$orchestra$conductor}

The displayFormat setting controls what is sent to the control point for display. It doesn't affect what appears in the index.

The All Artists index contains all the Artist tags from all the files in your library. This is the meaning of 'complete'. Unlike the Artist index (which can contain a mixture of Artist tag information and AlbumArtist tag information), the All Artists index contains Artist tag information only.

Quote:I also note that neither BAND nor ORCHESTRA is listed in the common FLAC tag list under 'Tag Mappings'. Is that intentional? BAND in particular is fairly standard is it not (I have used it and put in a alias to ORCHESTRA)?

This is intentional. Any tags not listed in the mappings can be used in your files and read by MinimServer, so there is no problem with using BAND or ORCHESTRA tags in your files. These tags aren't in the list of mappings because they would appear "as is" in FLAC/Vorbis, ID3v2 and iTunes tags and therefore don't need any special mapping treatment.

Thanks for responding.

However, I admit to giving in. To be honest, as a simple 'user' I don't understand some of the answers. They may well make sense to the designers, but as a user, I'm baffled. Please don't get me wrong. I really like the interface, and have now got it 99% as I'd like it and much better than any other UPnP server I have come across, including my modified foobar2000 interface which was previously my best stab at a tailored user interface for classical.

So this isn't in any way a complaint, but I hope it might help you understand why I, and maybe some other users, might be a little confused at times.

The difference you have described between Artist and All Artists, except that the former includes Album Artist, seems obscure, and why the former is not divided up into separate items but the latter is, still totally escapes me - they are all both lists of Artists after all. The fact that 'All Artist' whilst 'complete' is nonetheless less 'complete' than 'Artist' (which include Album 'Artist' as well so is surely more 'complete') gives rise to some semantic puzzlement on my part. Never mind - I know how to use them now. I'm sure there's a good technical reason for the difference, but the terminology has led me down some long garden paths.....

Similarly, I still cannot for the life of me see why BAND is any less eligible for inclusion in your tag list than, say , CONDUCTOR, even if it is handled in the same way across different standards, just for completeness. Every other common tag is in the list. This (or ORCHESTRA) seems to be the only tag referred to elsewhere in the guide that isn't in the list. I spent hours (shows how dim I am) reading, and checking, and looking and not finding, any reference to these in your list. I almost gave up and assumed that that BAND could not be used. It might help simpletons like myself if you included it anyway.

I must be getting too old, since I also don't understand what is meant by "The displayFormat setting controls what is sent to the control point for display. It doesn't affect what appears in the index.". But the index is what is 'displayed' on the control point when I am selecting things, isn't it? Or is there some other subtlety in the words used that I am missing? When I see "Julius Katchen, LPO, Adrian Boult" (or whatever) is that not a different index entry from "Julius Katchen, LSO, István Kertész"? I hesitate to ask what 'indexFormat' is, since it is only listed, not described, in the same section.

Sorry for being so thick. I'm not expecting a reply. I can use the server now, which is all that matters Once I crack the gapless and multi-standard renderer problems (I have a 'cunning plan') I'll have a working system.

[simoncn]

(10-12-2013 22:42)Pastim Wrote:  Sorry for being so thick. I'm not expecting a reply. I can use the server now, which is all that matters Once I crack the gapless and multi-standard renderer problems (I have a 'cunning plan') I'll have a working system.

Thanks very much for your thoughtful comments and observations. I will not attempt to continue the discussion here. Instead, when the next release is out, I will revisit the documentation sections relating to the points you have raised and I will do my best to provide better explanations and clearer terminology for everything that you have listed as being baffling. This feedback is extremely useful, and I am very grateful that you have taken the time to provide it.