Asset uPNP & DLNA

[dvdr]

Re: Asset uPNP & DLNA

Hi
thanks for 0.9b - first, quick impression: big problem when browsing using "genre"

When I use the browsing path genre -album, whatever album I click on, I do get ALL titles of the chosen genre displayed, whatever artist and whatever album they are from, they all are displayed together
When I use the browsing path genre - artist, I do get the option to browse into the albums of the chosen artist. Inside, ALL albums of the genre are listed,whatever artist they are from.

When NOT using "genre" as a starting point, but starting with artists or albums, this does not seem to happen.

Just a quick first impression, don't have the time to investigate further, but will do so asap...

[Neptuni]

Re: Asset uPNP & DLNA

Hi!

A respons to 0.9 beta version:

Plugplayer on Ipod working nice as before (using flac files).

PS3:

Still protocol error -1 and no music files listed.
utf-8 problem in servername solved, now åöä displayed as it should be:smile2:

But no music available to be streamed.

/Mikael

[Spoon-]

Re: Asset uPNP & DLNA

@dvdr

If you can try this new version and report any issues (much has changed).

Code wise we are feature rich for a release, just have to extend compatibility and remove any left over bugs.

PS3 Support

Anyone with a PS3 please test this new version.

[Spoon-]

Re: Asset uPNP & DLNA

Big Update to 0.9 beta - download as first message

when returning a path (track or folder) have a string list and return au1, au2, au3, au4 for speed - au as object ids of 13 or 7 sent anyhow by xbox
sonos compatible - through rhapsody (yet to test)
added LPCM forced streaming option
added MediaExcludeExts.txt file which is extensions excluded from library (ie .wav)
added special option to the browse tree {_no_track_list_} which stops the track listing, for example:

Title{_no_track_list_}
Title\[A to Z]\Title

The above will allow the selection A-Z of titles without having the track listing prior to selecting A-Z

Added special option to the browse tree {_sort_year_} which lists tracks or albums by the release year, for example:

Title{_sort_year_}

Added new tree items sorting the albums by release year:

Advanced Search\Album by Release
Advanced Search\Album by Release\[A to Z]
Advanced Search\Album by Release\[A to Z]\Album by Release
Advanced Search\Artist by Release
Advanced Search\Artist by Release\[A to Z]
Advanced Search\Artist by Release\[A to Z]\Artist by Release
Advanced Search\Artist by Release\[A to Z]\Artist by Release\Album by Release
Advanced Search\Artist by Release\Album by Release
Advanced Search\Contributing Artists

multiples handled - artists, genres, etc
Added option to show contributing artists in main artist listing



Upgrading from previous beta

Uninstall Asset UPnP, reboot computer, browse to:

%appdata%\dBpoweramp\uMediaLibrary\

and delete all files (if on Windows Home Server then delete all in:

C:\Documents and Settings\Default User\Application Data\dBpoweramp\uMediaLibrary

Then install new beta. )

[dvdr]

Re: Asset uPNP & DLNA

Spoon

another observation during testing Asset uPNP:

Multidisk-Albums are not recognized and/or displayed and properly sorted
All over sudden, I got entries of album artists in front of titles
Albums with the same name, but different album artists contain files from all artists (Spoon, you are already aware of that...)
Caveat: not sure, whether my indexing is following all the official rules, so please take this with a grain of salt and correct me, where I am using a wrong path...

Here are the details:

- Setup: uPNP 0.8b, Kinsky-Software from oss.linn.co.uk, Linn DS Player
- Ripping a 12 disc set "Brahms chamber music (complete)" using Batchripper
- Ending up with several folders and the music, according to returned Music-Database results - some of the discs were not properly recognized to be part of that special disc-set but assigned with the album titles and album-art of the original first issues of the discs. I knew, this was most likely to happen, so I manually corrected the following:

changing Album: "Brahms chamber music (complete)" for all albums, assign "album artist" for each single disc (not, if 2 concertos with different artists/groups are on a single disc, then only artist values are present)
Number each disc with Disc-ID-Tag "x/12". The batch ripper result did not mark the discs as part of a compilation, I left that untouched in the beginning.

Browsing albums, the following happens:

- I get one entry "Brahms chamber music (complete)" PLUS
several entries "Brahms chamber music (complete) [Album Artist]".
- When browsing into these choices, I get a complete listing of all ~90 tracks. They are identical in all cases, so even a folder "Brahms chamber music (complete) [Novo Trio]" shows all other entries of the other album artists
- Futhermore, these tracks are sorted numerically, not by disc/tracknumber: all first tracks of each disc are listed first, then all second tracks etc.
- Also, this listing does not contain the track title first, but in front of the track title, the an album artist is displayed. Never saw that before...

I then manually assigneda "compilation=1"-ID-value to all files.

Now, I did not have any "Brahms chamber music (complete) [Album Artist]" entries anymore, just "Brahms chamber music (complete)".
But the above mentioned problem with the display persisted:
- tracks were sorted numerically, not by disc/tracknumber
- also, I still had an Album Artist in front of each title, so couldn't see the title

I then also deleted all "Album Artist" entries, only left the track artist entries

- Still, tracks were sorted numerically, not by disc/tracknumber
- IIrc, I now had an track-artist entry in front of each title

As I said: I am not 100% sure, whether what I was doing was completely complying with any official sorting/indexing rules. I thought, if I had an album consisting of several CDs, but with the same album title, then I browse to the album, and Disc 1, track 1, 2, 3,.... 10 are listed, followed by Disc 2, track 1, 2, 3, etc...

[Marek-f]

Re: Asset uPNP & DLNA

The last Version 0.8beta dosent work on my T+A.

Marek

[dvdr]

Re: Asset uPNP & DLNA

Spoon - this is perfect as always :-)

[Spoon-]

Re: Asset uPNP & DLNA

At the moment multiple [artists/composers, etc] are not yet done, they are being added as we speak. Also the SSDP crash might be fixed by the next release (0.9)...and many more nice options

About multiples, it is difficult, lets say for one Album there is a composer: XYZ; 123 (ie 2 composers), the way we will implement it is the 2nd composer 123 will list seperately if browsing by composer, rather than XYZ; 123

[dvdr]

Re: Asset uPNP & DLNA

A few remarks and questions on 0.8 beta.
1) ..... I added new DB fields (e.g. 'ensemble' in FLAC for orchestra) and added them to the uPnP tree, deepened the Composer tree to Composer\Genre\Album ...

Be careful - there is an option in dBpoweramp ripper, where (in advanced settings for flac) it patches album artist to ensemble, if I remember correctly. So you might end up with orchestras, that are no orchestras... I've added a custom field in dBpoweramp ripper called "orchestra" and fill that manually using EditIDTag after each rip. By manually adding this field into the database configuration file of Asset uPNP and defining a browsing tree element in the other config file, I can access that without problems. This is strictly limited to your installation of Asset uPNP, though, and not officialy supported and read by other servers, so don't rely on any other programs/software than Asset-uPNP to understand that

3) .... Being able to sort on other criteria such as opus numbers would be great....

As above - you could create custom fields such as "composition" and "opus". It's a little more work after each rip, but indexing and later on finding these values is worth the effort imho

5) .... only one artist per track. ....

When ripping with dBpoweramp or editing with EditID, you could delimit track-artists by " ; " and assign a single artist to be "album artist". In dBpoweramps ID-tag-options check the " ; "-option and "import multiple artists from non-multiple-artists-aware programs" - that way, Asset uPNP afaik will support multiple track artists - then it's all about your browsing structure, how to find artists.... Not 100% sure about that at the moment though, I still have to test that, but it should work.
One thing, that I ask myself, though, is support for multiple composers, lyricists and genres. Could they be delimited by " ; "? Often enough, I would sort an album both - for example - under Jazz and Vocal, or would love to have an album show up under Pop, Rock or classical as some sort "main category", but also, when I do a more specific search, have them also filed under more special genres.
Same problem with multiple composers - setting up a tree element "composer" brings up individual and combined works by composers X, Y and Z like

X      work a b c
X;Y    work d
X;Z    work e
Y      work f
Z      work g

etc., and not

X       work a b c d e
Y       work d f
Z       work e g

So, does anybody know, whether that is possible?

[JMinSF]

Re: Asset uPNP & DLNA

A few remarks and questions on 0.8 beta.

1) I like the flexibility of the DB design and the uPnP tree structure. I added new DB fields (e.g. 'ensemble' in FLAC for orchestra) and added them to the uPnP tree, deepened the Composer tree to Composer\Genre\Album - it all worked without any problem. I hope this degree of customization will remain (and even increase) as you go to 1.0...

2) As dvdr mentionned in an earlier post, the uPnP tree sometimes expands down to the track level. I have not been able to figure out in which cases this happens (e.g., listing Genre does not show tracks, but listing a specific genre shows all the corresponding tracks together with the 3 submenus for artist, album and rating). It would be good to have control of whether tree nodes present all underlying tracks or not.

3) Support for the sort order fields would be nice (mostly albumsortorder, because it is the only one that is not obvious). Being able to sort on other criteria such as opus numbers would be great.

4) For classical music, the album and track titles tend to be split in pieces, e.g. album and albumsubtitle, title and part. Being able to pull them back together would be useful. In general, it would be nice to describe how to go from tag fields to uPnP descriptor

5) Warning, mined terrain... One sore spot with classical music and all the tagging schemes is that there is really room for only one artist per track. Some programs use multiple artists (separated by & or /), but there is no agreement on this, and it breaks artistsortorder. The alternative is to use the musician credits field for that purpose, but it is very poorly supported by almost all the application (tagging & serving) I have seen.

6) This may be a side-effect of XBMC. When a node returns a track list and menus, the menus show up at the end of the list. This may require a lot of scrolling (over 1000 tracks of Bach cantatas...) to get to the menu. XBMC offers the choice to sort by name, which puts the menus back at the beginning, but then this reorders the tracks within the album - not good for an opera!

Thanks again for what looks like a very promising new program.

[JMinSF]

On Vista Ultimate SP1 - stop SSDP

I'm running Vista Ultimate SP1 64. You need to stop the SSDP service to run Asset-uPnP (0.8 beta), otherwise Asset-uPnP crashes instantly. This seems to be a common problem for uPnP servers under Vista, see e.g. http://www.dbstalk.com/showthread.php?t=134161 .

Once the SSDP service is out of the way, it works very nicely. I'm using XBMC as my test uPNP client under Vista. Initial library scan (~12,000 tracks) from my server was reasonably fast (~ 10'). Response time from the uPnP client is very smooth, even on a moderately large library.

Are you planning on a Windows Server (2003) service packaging eventually? I'm not sure the WHS version would work exactly as-is since it might install some extraneous stuff.

Thanks for an excellent preview of things to come...

[dvdr]

Special charachters sorting (letters "é" etc.)

Another observation, whilst running AssetuPNP in the 0.8 version (pretty stable, Kinsky 1.4.1 crashing sometimes with an "outer exception" when browsing too fast, kinsky latest nightly build 1.5 being really slow in browsing):

special characters like é, á, è etc., quite common in classical music, are not sorted in at the place, where I would expect them.

An example: the CD-Title "Réflexions" by "Hélène Grimaud" is not sorted between "Red Letter Day" and "Reiner conducts Wagner" in Albums, but between "Rural Renewals" and "Salt", this means: at the end of letter "R".

Same with the artist: she is set at the end of letter "H", between "Hush" and "Ian Shaw", and not between "Helen Schneider" and "Helmuth Rilling", where I would search her.

Not sure, though, whether this is just a personal expectation, that is not according to official sorting rules....

[dvdr]

MP3 Clicks at the beginning/end

Quickly, an observation, when streaming mp3 to my Linn DS:
when switching from one track to the next, there is a click/pop between tracks.
With flac, that does not happen. Also, playing the mp3's singularily, no clicks and pops happen, only, if I select the whole album and add it to the DS's playlist via Kinsky.

Settings: Asset uPNP 0.7, default settings, no forced wav, all tracks have been ripped&encoded with dBpoweramp using lame@vbr "extreme"

[Neptuni]

Re: Asset uPNP & DLNA

One more thing to inform, utf-8 works well in song names, but not in the server name announced...

/Mikael

[Neptuni]

Re: Asset uPNP & DLNA

Hi Again,

Some feedback on PS3 and Asset uPNP:

Still a DLNA communication protocol error (-1) on connection.
PS3 sees the uPNP server on pictures,music and video.
No music listed for the Asset uPNP server.
Problem with utf-8 characters, uPNP name is cut at the utf-8 character ie:

a name like "Mickes_Knähund" is displayed as "Micke_Kn"

The PS3 works well if I set up uPNP in Windows mediaplayer and the name is showed correctly, ie as "Mickes_Knähund".


/Mikael