UnitiServe and nested folders
Posted by: Bart on 08 May 2013
Hoping to share my experience with others . . .
As my music collection in the Downloads folder grows, it has become clear that the uServe does a much more robust job of finding and indexing new additions if they are not buried in nested folders. If I add a new folder two or three levels below the top level Downloads folder, there is an EXTREMELY good chance that the uServe will not see it upon re-indexing. But if I add it to the top level folder, or one folder deeper, it will be found.
I don't think of this as a 'defect,' but just an observation. Now that I no longer employ nested folders to organize the music, the uServe finds it much better 
I used to use a structure as in Grateful Dead | Live Grateful Dead | Spring 1999 Box Set | <individual cds> I was finding that the uServe had failed numerous times to properly index the individual cd's. But when I eliminated 2 of those folder levels -- the cd's finally were found and indexed.
First off, a huge THANK YOU to Phil and great Naim service. He spent an hour with me this am looking into my music indexing issues.
The result, which hopefully will be informative to others:
The two folders that would never index each had an odd 'bullet' character as the last character of the folder name. This character was invisible in OS X finder, so I had no idea it was there. Phil had me put the folders on a usb stick and he logged into my Windows laptop, and there the extraneous character was visible. Once deleted, the uServe happily indexed those folders.
Additionally, it has become clear that the uServe does not like many non-alphabetic, non-numeric characters. This is true both in the folder name and in the tags themselves. If there is a quotemark ( " ) or greater than sign ( > ) in a tag, that will be the last song indexed. Some tagging databases uses these characters and they must be removed from your tags it seems. I had a number of partially-indexed cd's due to this, and when I removed those characters they re-indexed fully. (A lot of tags for live Grateful Dead music use the > sign to denote that the song blends into the next song, and over the last few days I had to remove all of them. But now those discs index properly.)
In summary, I think that the problem was not nested folders after all, but the presence of incompatible characters in either the folder name or the tag data. And again, CHEERS to Phil for helping me out with this. This was great service from a great company 
+ 1.
Phil Harris..........top Man! 
Regards,
Dave.