Search & Playlists

[Vim_Fuego]

SO after spending some time reorganising my collection, so albums are in one directory, and everything else, odds and ends, complications, and other things that "pollute" the artist/album browse (by sending you down dead ends that contain just 1 track and so on) and in their own directories outside of the artist/album folder structure. Thing are now a bit better. I worked around some inconsistencies in behavior vs documentation with regards to playlist handling, and have M3U playlists generated for compilation albums.

My last problem, now I have split my music up, search only includes album results, not results from files that are in my "everything else" directory is less structured media.

IS there a way to include them?

[Spoon]

Re: Search & Playlists

Not if you have excluded them.

[Vim_Fuego]

Re: Search & Playlists

They are included as playlists, so the tracks are in the database, but not part of search results.

[Spoon]

Re: Search & Playlists

Tracks in Playlists are only searchable if the tracks are also indexed by Asset.

[Vim_Fuego]

Re: Search & Playlists

OK thanks. I hope you consider changing this, or making it a setting, as search is really important to me (which is why I don't use the built in Synology media server or Plex as neither support search).

The only 2 decent mediasevrers that do appear to be Asset and Twonkymedia. Twonkymedia however also indexes tracks contained in playlists, so for the moment, I'm going to revert to my Twonky docker setup, and might perhaps re-evaluate Asset in the future, as currently it's not fitting my needs.

Also perhaps related, items in Asset playlists didn't serve embedded album art to BubbleUPNP, but worked as soon as I switched back to Twonky.

[Vim_Fuego]

Re: Search & Playlists

I never got past this hurdle with asset, if titles are in a playlist, they don't appear in search results. I evaluated MinimServer 2, which does appear to implement search correctly.

Asset is a nice product, but the search issue is a show stopper for me.

[Vim_Fuego]

Re: Search & Playlists

Any movement on this? Wondering if it's time to re evaluate asset or stick to my aging docker twonky setup..

[simbun]

Re: Search & Playlists

I never got past this hurdle with asset, if titles are in a playlist, they don't appear in search results. I evaluated MinimServer 2, which does appear to implement search correctly.

In MinimServer, every file referenced by a playlist MUST be part of the indexed content directory otherwise an error will be thrown during scanning. When performing a UPnP search the track is returned, no link to the playlist (unless the playlist name also matched the search term).

In AssetUPnP even the tracks referenced by playlists that reside outside the content directory showed up in the playlist, although the metadata was limited so I assume my control point was pulling that from the file itself.

So from my understanding they both work the same from a UPnP search perspective, unless I've misunderstood you.


If you're happy with Twonky then stick with it.

[Vim_Fuego]

Re: Search & Playlists

I'm not really rang happy with it, as it often corrupts it's database and freezes on me. It's pretty much unsupported abandonware these days.

It's only redeeming feature was it got search and indexing correct. No other product I tried worked, they all had limitations, particularly around search.

Emby was really bad, asset didn't include music in playlists and I forget what the issue was with minimserver.

More than happy to buy a product that is right, however not found one yet.

[simbun]

Re: Search & Playlists

Emby was really bad, asset didn't include music in playlists and I forget what the issue was with minimserver.

More than happy to buy a product that is right, however not found one yet.

I don't think there's a problem with the software at all, the problem really is that you have

other things that "pollute" the artist/album browse (by sending you down dead ends that contain just 1 track and so on)

Given that all the servers I've used require the items in a playlist to be part of the indexed collection - and there's likely never going to be any change to that - you should really be looking for a way to exclude the noise from the main collection for browsing purposes.

Given that you've split them into folders you could, in MinimServer, browse initially by Folder to select your "clean" folder, then switch back to Tag View.
Alternatively, if you tag all the tracks that you want to exclude you could easily exclude those with a custom index in both servers.

The latest AssetUPnP now has preformat functionality; I wonder if you could use that to create a new tag based on the path (clean vs noisy), and use that as the browse index to subset the tracks rather than have to create a real tag in the files.

[simbun]

Re: Search & Playlists

The latest AssetUPnP now has preformat functionality; I wonder if you could use that to create a new tag based on the path (clean vs noisy), and use that as the browse index to subset the tracks rather than have to create a real tag in the files.

Curiosity got the better of me, and it is possible.

MediaDatabaseFieldsv7a.txt:

subset,TEXT

AssetUPnPUserRenameList.txt:

preformat:=subset:=[if][GRAB]1,26,[origpath][],=,D:\MUSIC_EXAMPLE\Test\ABBA,Clean,Noisy[]

Browse Tree:

  Subset	Disable 'A-Z', Enable 'No Track Listing'
    root

Whilst it's possible I have no idea how this would run against a big collection. It at least demonstrates - without having to make any tag changes - how it would work, and if it works for you then maybe create an additional tag in the "other" files and use that to filter.

[Vim_Fuego]

Re: Search & Playlists

This sounds really promising, so thanks for the help so far. I've just bought a copy of Asset, as my trial had run out, from previous testing.as it does appear to be pretty robust so far on with my HEOS based system, and it's only £30 (aside from -519 error, not sure if this is a server or client error code). I'm not that familiar with some of the stuff in the last post, so might need a little more hand-holding on how to configure this.

I have added my media as 3 main "roots"

/volume2/music/Albums
/volume2/music/Compilations
/volume2/music/OddsAndEnds

I have massively trimmed by browse tree down, as it was overwhelming by default (I might add stuff back later, once things are working), it now looks like this:

+\Album
Album{_a_to_z_}
Playlists
New Albums
Jukebox Track Selection
Top Artists
Top Artists\Album
Top Albums
TuneIn Internet Radio

Where do I go from here?