DLNA Navigation [#8740] FIXED

[Scott]

Oh I see, share a collection that doesn't include Virtual CDs at all. Then the Location node for that collection wouldn't be cluttered by the Virtual CDs, and I could navigate by path. I could make a separate Collection for Virtual CDs and navigate that by other nodes, since it would be a smaller subset. Then when using DLNA, to listen to a song I just have to remember whether I have it on Virtual CD or not.

Not ideal, but it may be an acceptable workaround. Other alternatives I've come up with:

1) Manually create a few hundred auto-playlists to break down my 14k artists into smaller chunks. This would be a lot easier if the advanced search in autoplaylists were even more advanced.
2) Rip all my CDs to regular FLAC tracks and get rid of all my Virtual CDs altogether.
3) Ignore DLNA until MM introduces better navigation and/or conforms better to DLNA specs.

A difficult choice!

[Lowlander]

2) You can already stop using the VirtualCD if you want to. Just move the songs to a non VirtualCD folder and scan them in (and clean up unavailable VirtualCD files).

[Scott]

You can already stop using the VirtualCD if you want to. Just move the songs to a non VirtualCD folder and scan them in (and clean up unavailable VirtualCD files).

I hadn't thought of that!

Makes sense, except it would complicate one of my "someday" projects: converting my Virtual CD collection from MP3 to FLAC. I have a ton of metadata on my Virtual CDs, and when re-ripping it's reasonably easy to preserve that metadata - if the tracks are in Virtual CD. If I just scan the MP3s in, then when I do re-rip the CDs to FLAC format I'll have to manually copy over the metadata for each field of each track from the MP3 version to the FLAC version. Does that make sense?

[Lowlander]

Advanced Duplicate Find & Fix can help you copy metadata: http://www.mediamonkey.com/forum/viewto ... +duplicate

[Scott]

Wow, that is one powerful script! Thanks for pointing me to it, I can think of many instances when that will be useful.

Unfortunately, it looks like Play Count and Last Played are stored in the db only, and aren't supported by MP3 tags. So the move-and-rescan method would lose some metadata that I wouldn't be able to recover later. I'd have to use the script for each album as I rescanned it, which would get pretty tedious after 1500 times. Better to just handle that during the "re-rip to FLAC" project.

However, it turns out that MediaMonkey has gotten really smart about re-rips since the last time I looked. It actually copies all the metadata from Virtual CD tracks to newly ripped tracks, which makes eliminating Virtual CD for a disc a brain-dead operation. I'm going to start on that project now, and use the separate collection method above for DLNA until then (or until the DLNA improvements).

Thanks for your help!

[bfuentes]

I've been thinking on this for a while and have added the following to Mantis: http://www.ventismedia.com/mantis/view.php?id=8740

The developers should look at Asset UPnp to see how a good implementation of an alphabetical listing on the player side looks. i use my DirecTv boxes. If I want to play a single artist I use Asset. For playlists I use MM. I would love to use MM for everything.

[rubberduck]

I have to say, that without the possibility to have the MagicNode functionality over DLNA (for example artists first letter (grouping/trimmin), then artists full name, then album and then title (i.e. nesting)), MM is no option for me as a media server.

I am using J. RIver MC right now and while it is feature rich as no other (unlimited custom fields, calculated fields, grouping, nesting, tag editing of multiple tracks directly in details view (including copy/paste!), etc.), I would like to replace it, as it lacks the required programmings skills and well-thoughts concepts (so new features take some major releases until working stable and good).
MM looked like the candidate to replace it, but as long as the mentioned DLNA navigation is not there, it is just not usable for me.

I might also add, that I'd regard the MagicNode functionality as mandatory to have in the main program. It's just too essential. As a consequence I would also get rid of auto-playlists, as they are similar to nodes already, but with MagicNode there is no difference at all anymore. All you need to do is to allow to create a node as a sub-node to another (which MagicNode does not right now) and to add an option if the sub-node should get the whole library or only the filter result of the parent. Then it is not necessary to distinguish between media tree nodes (root) and tree nodes (location, etc.) as they are all the same and only differ by what the show, how they are filtered, sorted and nested.

[rusty]

Major improvements have been made here in MM 4.1 build 1625/26 vis a vis support for custom nodes, segmentation of the collection, and making segmentation configurable. Check it out in the beta forum.

-Rusty