Messages

16

Questions / Re: Any way to group Album Artists???

« on: April 03, 2019, 05:55:22 PM »

Sweet - Please let me know if I'm showing you the wrong windows and I will edit this post to what's needed:






Hmmm why is it that some fields are greyed out on one but not the other?

17

Questions / Re: Any way to group Album Artists???

« on: April 03, 2019, 05:00:11 PM »

Group by is just Album Artist

Would be happy to screenshot my settings if you can tell me which you want to look at. 
Can also upload my MB generated "settings snapshot" if that helps?


Ugh so close......I fell asleep with the laptop laying on me last night trying to figure this out lol

Thanks again - SO much for the guidance!

18

Questions / Re: Any way to group Album Artists???

« on: April 03, 2019, 03:10:55 PM »

Oh man ok I changed the sorting of the middle panel to "Genre/Album Artist/Album"

and look!


Nearly exact to what I'm looking for (though why is the Steve Roach group showing before the Marshmello?)

but oh.....spoke to soon.  For whatever reason in the next sort artist group, Marshmello is NOT grouping together.
Album Artist and genres are identical - why is MB doing this??



At least i have another slight clue but I'm really baffled here.  On this 2nd screen shot the albums are also now out of ABC order.  What rules are MB following here?

19

Questions / Re: Any way to group Album Artists???

« on: April 01, 2019, 08:12:31 PM »

Yes I have that much accomplished I think.  Now I'm getting cosmetic and picky

So, sure enough they are appearing in ABC order - I changed "Happier" to "Zappier" and it got moved to the bottom:





What I'm looking to do is group by album artist in the middle pane.
So that I only see one instance of Steve Roach and "Marshmello with dude" in that god awful blue (where do i change this font??)
Under each album artist I would like the albums tied to that name.  So under Steve Roach would be the two 2.2018 live dates and Soul Tones.  Under the "Marshmello with dude" would be that Doors album and what is now "Zappier" lol

Played around for like 30 min last night and couldn't get anywhere with this :-/  Very bizarre to behave this way it's being told to group by Album Artist but the only grouping that will truly happen is if there are consecutive albums in ABC order that happen to have the same Album Artist?

20

Questions / Re: Any way to group Album Artists???

« on: April 01, 2019, 05:27:58 PM »

Oh you're a sharp cookie! 

So the question then is - how do I get these all grouped by Album Artist?  The grouping setting I thought would have done the trick.
ABC order after that is great, or chronological

21

Questions / Re: Any way to group Album Artists???

« on: April 01, 2019, 04:20:00 PM »

The middle panel has the contents and layout I'm going for but why i would see the same exact Album Artist twice and not see those albums grouped together?

Here are each:


and






......uh could it be format?  The two on top are WAV files.

22

Questions / Re: Any way to group Album Artists???

« on: April 01, 2019, 03:29:47 PM »

Genre category i need to look at closer - what I did last week was only messing with the genres.  Hard to understand what the difference between the two is really.

So I added a little more music to see how MB would react and I'm scratching my head as to why these Steve Roach albums are not being grouped together.
Middle panel is album art > grouped by Album Artist.  Both the one at the bottom and the two at the top both show Steve Roach Album Artist and Artist.
Any clue as to why this is happening??

23

Plugins / Re: UPnP/ DLNA device support

« on: March 31, 2019, 06:54:52 PM »

Well I shall keep digging and will love to share any findings should they be noteworthy!

This plugin although only tested on two quick occasions did what it was supposed to do so maybe there's enough hope there.  Perhaps on some of the DLNA devices I have I can figure a way to "turn them off" in terms of searching for other devices?

I've got plex running fine - from a listening standpoint everything is great.  I just hate the interface and the idea of always having to use it when browsing my music for playback.
So I'm just trying to push the issue with MB because I really like all that it has to offer with custom layouts.  Strange to me that outputting to these devices is still getting ignored I would think this is where everything is going anyway?

24

Plugins / Re: UPnP/ DLNA device support

« on: March 31, 2019, 05:15:39 PM »

Hmmm.....well there is but one device I'm trying to connect to - a chromecast audio connected to my receiver.  So in the way you explain perhaps this is good.  I'm sure I have other DLNA equipped devices though - is it fathomable that they could cause trouble?  Even though I'm making no attempt on either end in having them communicate?

Reading up on the Subsonic link and wondering if that could work.
Wondering why an app is even needed there though.  Can't you just map a network drive and have MB read from there? 
Outputting the audio is my dilemma and I know that subsonic speaks nicely to chromecast.  So perhaps I could have subsonic running - using purely MB as the interface and running it's own library - playback gets sent to the subsonic which sends to the chromecast?  dang i feel old


phred - if you have the minute I would love to hear what you mean by playlists and exporting them.  i've never cared about the word "playlist" until i gave up CDs.  now people talk about it and I scratch my head and feel embarassed

25

Plugins / Re: UPnP/ DLNA device support

« on: March 31, 2019, 08:34:18 AM »

Coming from CDs only a year ago I'm not sure I understand playlists in the way you mention.  I think of a playlist as a mixtape lol.  Grab some tracks and throw them in a certain order "this is my halloween playlist".  
Are you using MB to control your playback on the fly?  Or just to manage your library?

I have plex that gives me that "anywhere in the world" luxury but the interface and ability to customize is lacking.  Looking around this was the best UI I could find but having it control playback of the NAS and stream to my chromecast has been a challenge thus far.  I have the plugin that spawned this thread but am not knowledgeable enough to know if it's taxing my CPU in a bad way.  I just don't want to end up damaging my hardware and efficiency if that's what this plugin means.

Anyway I need to just understand more about how MB and Subsonic can communicate.  Off to google land

26

Plugins / Re: UPnP/ DLNA device support

« on: March 30, 2019, 10:03:26 PM »

Thanks much for the reply!
Is there any other solid streaming solution that you can recommend?
I'm trying to figure out how MB ties in with Subsonic.  Would I be able to use MB to stream direct from NAS to device?

27

Plugins / Re: UPnP/ DLNA device support

« on: March 30, 2019, 05:05:05 PM »

The UPnP/DLNA plugin has a known history of spiking CPU usage. Just having it installed and not being used will cause CPU usage to hit 100%. The solution is to disable it and/or remove it.

Some followups for the tech illiterate

-Does this make the plugin not worth using?
-Is there any alternative that would achieve the same results?
-So you are saying that simply disabling the plugin when not in use is a valid solution?



General for all peeps - Are you currently using this plugin regularly and with success??
I'm just wondering whether I should be putting stock and hope in this direction or not.
Thx!

28

Questions / Re: Any way to group Album Artists???

« on: March 30, 2019, 04:43:01 PM »

took a look there and saw were i could delete/create all new genres.  i don't see how there would be a permanent link between album artist and genre though?
I created a genre "ok then" and linked one of the marshmello releases to it - yet the other marshmello release didn't move with it and i didn't see a chance to click "update" to get it to move per the new rule i set.



that said maybe it's not a problem for me where artists are mapped, as long as the album artists are.  still trying to coax the sort album artist to my liking i have something close (and better) to what plex was doing:


Now when I go into each bucket (steve roach and sting) I can see the included albums broken out by their true album artists. 
Question is how does this play out when I add another 800 gigs

side questions as i continue to dig -
-Where can I change the font for the album artists in the middle panel?  that bright bold blue has to go!
-That said I would like to explore other skins/themes etc. - to keep the panels set as i have them I can only use other variations of dark fine tuned eh?
-Would I be able to transfer settings info easily from PC to Tablet in the future?  Like I would much prefer to do the maintenance work at my desk with full screen etc but ultimately i need to see all those results on the tablet where I'll actually be enjoying all of this.  Are there certain files I could copy/paste over?  Does having the "portable" version solve this in that I could just copy this whole folder over to the tablet and that's that?  Perhaps another copy/paste/overwrite any time I wanted to update the tablet from the PC setup?
-I believe all the messing around I've been doing is only affecting the MB database correct?  Is there more than one checkbox I need to worry about in terms of MB editing the actual tags in the files?


Thanks for keeping with me I extend to you a digital hug!
Really means so much to me all of this - playing with my music collection is like playing with my emotions 

29

Questions / Re: Any way to group Album Artists???

« on: March 29, 2019, 07:47:31 PM »

Ok for posterity sake here is what i have in plex:


On the top image you can see my FSOL bucket which includes Future Sound of London and a bunch of random remixes they've done.  I would never want to see those artists anywhere else, as the driving factor for owning them is precisely FSOL  Humanoid is an alias of FSOL they are in there.  Any time I add another Humanoid release it will automatically go to this bucket.  The 2nd image shows how i can pull up my "collections".  Less than ideal that it's a drop down and even worse the way it's handled on Android.  Just cumbersome and clunky.


So I played around more last night and the Sort Artist route seems like it could work out.  What kind of pitfalls can you fathom?  I'm trying to think as far ahead as possible and why this or the genre route might cause a real problem at some point.

I suppose it would be nice to tweak my 2nd pane in such a way that I can see the actual album artists under a given sort artist category. So like you see in plex under the FSOL heading there are a bunch of album artists - some of which have more than one album.  I can click into Humanoid and see the various releases under that Album Artist.
Here is my Steve Roach bucket with a bunch of stuff mapped weird as a test:

This is good - I see the true album artist names.  Would be nice though if instead of each album I could see each Album Artist (which could be clicked into to see the albums).  When I change that 2nd field to "Artist"....all I'm getting is Steve Roach and the albums below appear as if he is the true Album Artist (which as we saw in the last screen isn't the case):

Ok so as I'm creating this post I guess I do see a potential problem.  As you stated earlier it seems that for the most part Album Artist/Artist follow the same sorting rules once set?  Like I don't seem able to make "Album Artist Marshmello = Steve Roach" AND "Artist Marshmello = Marshmello"

Maybe genre is the way to go afterall. How do I go about creating a custom genre in Tags2??  Also is there a limited number of these I can create??  I would need 100s.  And this genre route would essentially say "any time you see incoming album artist Bon Jovi - put this into the "Bon Jovi genre"?

30

Questions / Re: Any way to group Album Artists???

« on: March 28, 2019, 09:54:25 PM »

Hmmm...so are you saying that what I have already done could work??  Unless sorting tags are already present in the incoming media, that much makes sense.
To be sure I understand - the fact that I edited this "at the album level" will translate into a permanent translation of The Doors Album Artist --> Sting Sort Album Artist?
This is what I currently have:


Is this close to correct? 
I only want the album artist to sort however - as there are times a given Artist may appear on a release from a different album artist (so what I mean is I would want it to stick with the album artist routing in all cases).   What is the deal with the checkmarks and why does the "artist sort by" auto populate itself with what I entered as the "album artist sort by"??  I suppose the latter won't matter much if my main method of browsing will be with album artists lumped into sort artist groups?


The 2nd suggestion you speak of I'm having trouble wrapping my head around.  I definitely don't care about genre tags or grouping at all.
Are you saying that using my example I would have a genre category of "Sting" and would edit the Doors album so that it is the "Sting genre" and thus every Album Artist Doors release will point to this genre (and thus genre category) going forward?  Is there any limit to the number of these genres I could create?  I would need 100s that's for sure.


If my understanding of your first suggestion is correct then I guess I'm accomplishing the same feat in both instances?  After some initial work of getting the album artists properly linked - from that point i'll be able to navigate the buckets I wish to see at the left and all new incoming releases will automatically hit the right buckets.....unless it's a new album artist that has never been linked to a defined sort artist in the past.  If they both accomplish the same result I think I would rather stick with "sort album artist" this way in most cases I can get a relevant picture in that list to the left.  I won't be keeping The Doors in a Sting bucket but I would have something like Sting albums sitting in the "The Police" bucket....and then I would have a pretty picture of the band for that line.



Thanks so much for taking the time to help me - I can't say how much all of this affects my emotions and being