Feature request for custom display of items

[asset-user]

Hi,

I'm currently evaluating a few UPnP servers for my home and found that Asset UPnP does a very good job. It fulfils all requirements (e.g. flexible browsing structure, support for multiple instances) except one: I'd like to see the subtitle with the title of an item.

My collection contains a lot of single vinyl and CD rips. These singles contain one song in different versions (e.g. Radio Mix, Extended Mix, Foobar Remix). I decided to use the title tag field for the title and the subtitle tag field for the version. When I use Asset to serve these audio files, the subtitle information is missing so that the songs cannot be distinguished. I was able to add the custom field subtitle to the list of database fields (MediaDatabaseFieldsv5.txt), and to add this field to the browse tree. The result is that all tracks that share a certain subtitle (e.g. Radio Mix) may be grouped together in the browse tree. Unfortunately, this is not very useful for my scenario. I'd like to see the subtitle with the title (e.g. Foo Bar (Radio Mix)) without touching the tags.

I've searched the forum on this topic. It looks like that there's currently no way to customize the way how items are displayed. Therefore I'd like to make this a feature request here.

My request in particular is only about seeing the subtitle with the title, and I'd be happy and satisfied with that. While I was browsing the forum on this topic, I found that other users have similar requirements on subtitle, duration or track vs. album artist. Maybe it's worth to think about a possibility to customize the item display like described in dBpoweramp Naming. This solution would cover a lot of other scenarios.

Please let me emphasize that I seriously evaluated different UPnP servers (Asset UPnP, MinimServer, ReadyMedia, Plex and others) and found out that Asset really has outstanding features. I found only MinimServer to be on par with Asset concerning a flexible browsing tree and configurability. Support for multiple instances is way better in Asset. The ability for customization of item display is the only feature that's offered by MinimServer and missing in Asset UPnP. I'd really love to see it here. I'm ready to give support and engagement on this feature if possible somehow.

- Christian

[mville]

Re: Feature request for custom display of items

I'm currently evaluating a few UPnP servers for my home and found that Asset UPnP does a very good job. It fulfils all requirements (e.g. flexible browsing structure, support for multiple instances) except one: I'd like to see the subtitle with the title of an item.

My collection contains a lot of single vinyl and CD rips. These singles contain one song in different versions (e.g. Radio Mix, Extended Mix, Foobar Remix). I decided to use the title tag field for the title and the subtitle tag field for the version. When I use Asset to serve these audio files, the subtitle information is missing so that the songs cannot be distinguished. I was able to add the custom field subtitle to the list of database fields (MediaDatabaseFieldsv5.txt), and to add this field to the browse tree. The result is that all tracks that share a certain subtitle (e.g. Radio Mix) may be grouped together in the browse tree. Unfortunately, this is not very useful for my scenario. I'd like to see the subtitle with the title (e.g. Foo Bar (Radio Mix)) without touching the tags.

If you have correctly defined subtitle in Asset, then your player is the issue here, as it is not displaying title + subtitle as you wish.

… and most players that I know of, will just use title, unless the player is very customizable (e.g. foobar2000) and you are able to display title + subtiltle.

[asset-user]

Re: Feature request for custom display of items

Thank you for your fast response.

I don't think that my requirement can be satisfied by the player. The UPnP control point has no notion of subtitles. It just receives an XML element dc:title from the Asset server and displays its content, whatever that may be. Asset is the component that decides which value this element should contain.

Asset already offers several configuration options to change the value of dc:title:

[track *] - [title] for album tracks

[artist] - [title] for Various Artist album tracks

[title] - [artist] for Title listing

For example, if you activate the first option, Asset sends the following XML element to the control point:

<dc:title> 1 Foo Bar</dc:title>

In this example, the dc:title element is composed of the tag fields tracknumber and title.

My feature request is about changing the value of dc:title either to

<dc:title>Foo Bar (Radio Mix)</dc:title>

or to a value whose format is read from a configuration option.

[mville]

Re: Feature request for custom display of items

I don't think that my requirement can be satisfied by the player. The UPnP control point has no notion of subtitles.

My point entirely. The player/control point needs to request subtitle from the server and most will NOT use the non-standard tag, subtitle.

UPnP servers will supply requested tags, but it is unrealistic to expect Asset to (know about) circumvent all player/control point shortcomings, as it has to adhere to the UPnP/DLNA protocols.

One way around this is to concatenate your title and subtitle tags.

[asset-user]

Re: Feature request for custom display of items

it has to adhere to the UPnP/DLNA protocols

I hardly see a difference between the concatenation of

1. tracknumber with title,
2. artist with title,
3. title with artist and
4. title with subtitle

with respect to adherence to the UPnP/DLNA standard. All of them merge standardized (at least for ID3, MP4, Vorbis, WMA and APE) audio tag values and transfer them in the XML element dc:title. This is perfectly OK since the definition of dc:title requires only to contain "A name given to the resource", which is certainly true for all four options. Asset currently supports no. 1-3, my request covers no. 4.

control point shortcomings

A control-point is a simple component with few features (browsing, controlling) and may be implemented in a low-end device. A server has more challenges (evaluating different metadata formats, building and managing the browsing tree, transcoding) and thus is a more powerful component. It is not unusual to have many different control-points, but it's uncommon to run more than one server. Therefore the server offers a better environment for customization than the control-points. Asset implements this idea, it is very customizable, there are even configuration settings per control-point. In my eyes it is better to control the presentation of an audio item once in a powerful server than repeating this in many simple control-points. Hence my feature request does not deal with shortcomings of the control points, but with configurability of the UPnP server.

Please don't get me wrong - I have no problem to accept when you have reasons not to implement the requested feature, be it effort, missing benefit or any other reason. I'd just like to understand the difference to Asset's current functional focus.

[schmidj]

Re: Feature request for custom display of items

FYI, Mville is, like me, another user, a pretty adept user, not an employee or contractor to the programmers of Asset. Much of the help and opinions you get on software forums is from other users.

[mville]

Re: Feature request for custom display of items

I hardly see a difference between the concatenation of

1. tracknumber with title,
2. artist with title,
3. title with artist and
4. title with subtitle

with respect to adherence to the UPnP/DLNA standard.

The difference is that tracknumber, title and artist are standard audio file tags, whereas subtitle is not a standard audio tag. As such, there is probably no reference to subtitle in the DLNA/UPnP specs, except in reference to serving movies with subtitles.

Personally, I populate the comment tag with the different version info. I expect other users will use a different custom tagging scheme to store this info.

As there is no standard for such tags, expecting Asset to know what to do with the plethora of end user personal tagging preferences, is simply unrealistic and impractical. If there were a standard version tag, then what you desire would be much more likely, IMO.

[mville]

Re: Feature request for custom display of items

A control-point is a simple component with few features (browsing, controlling) and may be implemented in a low-end device. A server has more challenges (evaluating different metadata formats, building and managing the browsing tree, transcoding) and thus is a more powerful component. It is not unusual to have many different control-points, but it's uncommon to run more than one server. Therefore the server offers a better environment for customization than the control-points.

Asset serves audio and metadata and has absolutely no control over the display of metadata in the control point.

[asset-user]

Re: Feature request for custom display of items

subtitle is not a standard audio tag

I disagree, it is well-defined for all major audio tag formats:

• TIT3 in the ID3 standard (reference)
• Subtitle on APEv2 (reference)
• WM/SubTitle on WMA (reference)
• ----:com.apple.iTunes:SUBTITLE on iTunes MP4 and SUBTITLE on Vorbis (using Musicbrainz, Hydrogenaudio, Mp3Tag as reference).

expecting Asset to know what to do with the plethora of end user personal tagging preferences, is simply unrealistic and impractical

I fully agree. Thus I made the proposal to make the dc:title element user-configurable as described in dBpoweramp Naming. This would allow a flexible mapping between audio tags and the UPnP element dc:title without implementing this hard-coded in Asset.

Asset serves audio and metadata and has absolutely no control over the display of metadata in the control point.

This is true, indeed. I probably used the wrong term here: custom display of items is misleading, custom presentation of audio tracks by configuration of UPnP element dc:title would have been more precise.

After all, thanks for your comments, @mville. I think I understand your point - in your eyes, this feature should not be implemented in a UPnP server because you classify subtitle as a non-standard tag field for audio, and a server should adhere to the standards. You'd prefer a standardized tag field version which unfortunately does not exist. In my eyes, subtitle is a standard audio tag and thus I created this feature request.

[mville]

Re: Feature request for custom display of items

After all, thanks for your comments, @mville. I think I understand your point - in your eyes, this feature should not be implemented in a UPnP server because you classify subtitle as a non-standard tag field for audio, and a server should adhere to the standards. You'd prefer a standardized tag field version which unfortunately does not exist. In my eyes, subtitle is a standard audio tag and thus I created this feature request.

No you misunderstand me, I don't think that the feature should not be implemented because subtitle is a non-standard tag. It is just that in my experience, subtitle is not used to hold the song version info.

In all my years of audio tagging, I have never seen the subtitle tag populated with the song version info or anything else for that matter, hence my belief it is non-standard. Just look at the metadata supplied from the Discogs, GD3, MusicBrainz and freedb databases.

If subtitle was widely used, Illustrate would have included the tag in it's software and control points would handle the tag and display it along with the title or at least give users the option to display it. You are right though, I would have liked to have seen a dedicated standard tag for version info, but as one does not exist, I use the title tag, with the info contained within square brackets e.g. Rebel Rebel [US single version] and the comment tag (because it is more commonly used).