eq72521 Wrote:
> I don't know about anyone else here, but my artist directory names are
> named so that everything sorts nicely. I've done this since the late
> '90s so when browsing to play MP3s on my computer, everything is in the
> right order. e.g.:
>
> Amos, Tori
> Bjork
> Bowie, David
> BT
> Cash, Johnny
> etc.
>
> But my ARTIST tags (for display in Winamp, etc.) are the normalized
> version (Tori Amos, Björk, David Bowie, etc.) This seems to be what
> everyone else does.
>
> When I first set up my Squeezebox about eight months ago, I was
> initially dismayed that browsing artists didn't work well because they
> were sorted incorrectly. I did some reading and discovered information
> about ARTISTSORT, but dang that sounded like a lot of tagging, and at
> the time the information I found was scant.
>
> Somewhere in there I discovered the wonderful "Browse Music Folder"
> option on slimserver, and that is still what I'm using today.
> Everything is in the right order. No wierdness with albums from one
> artist being listed under two names ("first last" and "last, first"
> because of older files that are inconsistently tagged). Certainly I
> want to have everything tagged correctly at some point (with ARTISTSORT
> and ALBUMSORT (by date) tags), but having "Browse Music Folder"
> certainly diminishes the impetus to do so, allowing me to work on the
> issue at my leisure.
Oooh. That's a very very interesting suggestion. You're lucky you
didn't go the Artistsort route because as you can see from my initial
post, that would have taken you straight back to your "initially
dismayed" state which is where I'm at now.
I have 2 problems at the moment with going the "Browse Music Folder"
route but maybe they can both be resolved. My issues with browsing
music folders are:
1) (This one is nothing to do with Slim Devices but I'll list it for
completeness.) I am using the Telcanto client and for some reason it
doesn't display the "folder.jpg" album cover art when browsing by music
folder. Hopefully when I report this it will be fixed because the native
Slim Server web interface shows the cover art OK and Telcanto shows it
OK when browsing by artist.
2) After much deliberation I adopted a directory structure on my PC
of:
FLAC\Artist_<A,B,C..Z>\<Artist Name>\<Album>\<Track(s)>
Unfortunately this means that when I browse by music folder I get an
extra level of directory structure that I deliberately introduced so as
to keep my disk files organised, i.e. the 26 <Artist_A,B,C..Z>
directories, but when browsing I don't want this division and just want
to scroll smoothly from the As to the Bs to the Cs all in one flat
list.
I just tried a quick experiment on my PC with shortcuts. I created a
shortcut at the "FLAC\..." level by creating a "FLAC\Bowie, David"
shortcut that points to my "FLAC\Artists_B\Bowie, David" directory.
This pretty much works in SlimServer in that browse by music folder
does see the "Bowie, David" as a clickable link under "FLAC" and when I
click on it it takes me to the contents of the "FLAC\Artists_B\Bowie,
David" directory, i.e. the list of the David Bowie albums. This means
that I could apply an "alternative view" on my current directory
structure by creating a very top level "J:\Music" folder that just
contains shortcuts to each of my individual artist directories and
point SlimServer at this directory as the root music folder. This way I
can still keep my FLAC files manageably (to me) split into <Artist_*>
directories but create a flat artist namespace for SlimServer (although
I haven't checked yet whether the SlimServer scan will follow the links
when it's compiling its tag database).
My remaining issues with the above are:
1) Will the SlimServer scan correctly follow shortcuts?
2) There is one annoying thing where, when browsing by music folder,
SlimServer (and hence Telcanto too) displays the shortcut as "Bowie,
David.lnk" rather than just "Bowie, David". I guess I should file this
as a bug.
3) The album directories are sorted alphabetically so I loose the
chronological ordering that I'd so carefully created using Albumsort
tags. I really don't want to mess up the naming of my Album directories
by prefixing the directory name with a year. This last issue is probably
the show stopper for me.
So, after some debate (most of which you just witnessed above!) I think
I'm back to filing the request for encancement and hoping I can get a
feature whereby the Artistsort tag value can be used instead of the
Artist value where appropriate for the list views (which does make a
huge amount of sense, if SlimServer is delivering a list that has been
sorted using Albumsort substitutions then surely it makes sense to have
an option for the labeling of that list to reflect the labels used to
sort it). This week has been a bit of a nightmare work-wise so I really
wil try to file the request in Bugzilla this weekend.
- Julian.
--
JulianL
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