I should re-state what I'd like to achieve.
The hierarchy of tags is missing a level. ALBUM refers to the name of
the CD or multi-CD set on which the track is found. TITLE refers to
the title of the individual track. However, if that track is part of a
multi-part piece of music such as a Sonata or Symphony, there is
(perhaps) no tag that serves to identify it as such.
Thus, if you want to play "this piece of music", you either have to add
each track individually, or add the whole album. The same goes for
shuffle play.
One workaround is to completely throw out the real album title and
place the title of the piece of music in the ALBUM tag. In doing so,
you lose the association with the other pieces of music on the album.
Besides, my main motivation here is that I would really like to have
the ability to treat an individual piece of music as a "song" when
shuffling by song. I find it irritating to be listening to my
Squeezebox and suddenly movement #2 of a symphony comes up, followed by
movement #4 of some other concerto. My primary mode of operation is
shuffle-by-song because much of my collection is "popular" music and I
don't want to listen to entire albums.
Clearly, slimserver would have to be adapted for this behavior. So,
how could this be implemented? My first idea was to use an additional
tag ("TIT1" in ID3v2.4, I don't know what it might be in Vorbis) for
the title of multi-part tracks, leaving TITLE (or TIT2) alone. Then
Slimserver would look for that tag and always group the tracks with the
same value for that tag.
ALBUM=Fred Plays Beethoven
WORK=Symphony No. 9
TITLE=iv. Presto
Another idea would be to use "TITLE" as the title of the multi-part
piece of music, and find or create a tag to indicate the name/number of
each part (track) of that piece. Then Slimserver would functionally
shuffle by the TITLE tag, and all parts of each TITLE would stick
together.
ALBUM=Fred Plays Beethoven
TITLE=Symphony No. 9
PART=iv. Presto
This actually seems more intuitive to me, since it groups multi-part
works at the same level as one-track songs. Like an album can be made
up of multiple discs, a "song" can be made up of multiple tracks.
It's not completely compatible with other players though. those
players would not pay attention to the PART tag and simply display a
bunch of tracks all titled "Symphony No. 9" with no clue as to which
part was which other than the track number. And I guess that would be
okay with me, since you could still tell which part was which by
looking at the order of the track numbers.
Or you could include the part number as part of the TITLE in the same
way that the disc number can be part of the ALBUM.
ALBUM=Fred Plays Beethoven
TITLE=Symphony No. 9 (4/5)
(PART=iv. Presto)
That way, slimserver could group parts of a song in the same way that
it groups discs of an album. The PART tag would not need to be present
for this method to function, but it could be used to provide additional
information: the subtitle of the part.
Going even a step further in being friendly to other players, but
requiring a little bit more parsing from slimserver, the subtitle of
the part could be embedded in the TITLE tag through clever syntax:
ALBUM=Fred Plays Beethoven
TITLE=Symphony No. 9 (4/5=iv. Presto)
--
John Stimson
------------------------------------------------------------------------
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View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=20850
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