Naim App to display Composer tag

Peter, Not directly. The best you can do is to create a composer bin on your media server and navigate via there, or if using Minimserver you can tell it to add the composer to the media title via the tag presentation manipulation parameters..  See Minimserver support site for examples.

i have requested before that the  tags displayed be configurable for the Naim app.. but so far it has not been implemented.

Simon

Thank you Simon. I will try out your suggestion re. changing the media title. Off to the MinimServer forum ....

/Peter

Peter, I use MPD as a music player server. Although slighltly better than UPnP servers in terms of tagging flexibility (it does support browsing files according to any of a fixed number of tags, among others a "Composer" tag), it does not support arbitrary user-definable tags. You cannot tag your music according to a, say, "First violinist" tag and then search your music collection accordingly. In this respect Naim apps are not better and, in fact, even worse than most MPD clients.

My current approach to at least mitigate this very sad state of affairs is -- as you suggest -- to pack a lot of information in the album title. For classical music, I name albums according to a Composer | Title | Artists scheme. For instance, all files in a

Bach, Johann Sebastian (1685-1750)/Brandenburgische Konzerte BWV 1046, 1047, 1051/Academy of St Martin in the Fields, Sir Neville Marriner/

share the album title

Bach | Brandenburg Concertos Nos. 1, 2, 6 | Neville Marriner, Academy of St Martin in the Fields

This is easy to realize and allows consistent browsing by folder and by album. But it is a poor's man, partial solution to a problem that can only be solved by better software: if you consider how tagging can be used in, say, programs for organising collections of digital photograps, what we are seeing in allegedly top apps is very primitive and certainly not user oriented. Crap software, in short. Best, nbpf

Many thanks nbpf. I have been browsing the MinimServer forum, and from what I understand, it is not possible to add the value of the composer tag to the album title based on for example the value of a genre tag, in other words all albums (including rock and pop albums) will be presented in the same way. (Well, I will pop the question over there as well just in case).

Last resort is to do like you, and of course, see whether I can influence Naim to make better use of the tags/metadata in future versions of the Naim App.

/Peter

Peter you can use the MinimServer displayRole feature to present the Composer under the Artist tag if the Composer value is present... Instructions are in the 'custom tag settings' section of the online MinimServer manual. Composer is specifically called out as a sometimes challenging area for control points.

In the tagCustom property insert the following.

Composer.displayRole={artist}

Simon

Thanks Simon,

That I understand, but does that not become "uinversal", i.e. if the composer value is present for a jazz, pop or rock track, then that is being displayed instead of the track artist?

I shall revisit that section again ... perhaps I got in wrong the first time ....

/Peter

Peter, it will add the artists/composers together. I am away from my Naim so can't confirm how the Naim app supports multiple tag values. The default on MinimServer I think is that it sends multiple tag name value pairs to the control point.. If the control point can't support that you can use something like

-all.display.multiTag

Where MinimServer will add the values into one string instead for all tag names or

-artist.display.multiTag

to merge the values just for the artist tag.

check with manual, and a little bit of trial and error

I would be surprised if it was possible, as far as I have understood UPnP implements fairly primitive tagging schemes and support little user customization. But it seems to me that your question has three aspects:

1) whether there are tagging programs that support adding the value of a COMPOSER tag to the value of the ALBUM tag if the value of the GENRE tag meets certain conditions.

2) whether the Minim server exports the COMPOSER tag to UPnP clients / control points

3) whether the Naim app can be configured to show the COMPOSER tag only for those items for which the GENRE tag meets certain conditions.

I do not know the anwser to 1) and I think that the answer to 2) is positive and the answer to 3) is negative. But I am not a Minim user and I know very little about the Naim app.

I have tagged my collection (mainly but not exclusively classical music) mainly with EasyTAG and lltag such that I have, for each file

a) a (possibly empty) COMPOSER tag,

b) a (possibly multi-valued) ARTIST tag,

c) a single valued ALBUM_ARTIST tag,

d) a single valued ALBUM tag. For classical music this is typically a string containing three separated substrings: composer, work and interpreter. The latter is just the value of the  ALBUM_ARTIST tag.

e) a (usually multi-valued) GENRE tag. I use this tag to encode properties for which I would define custom tags if UPnP and MPD servers were decent enough to support tag customization. A typical example of a GENRE tag (e.g., for Bach's Brandenburg Concertos) is "classical - baroque - orchestra - concerto". If I was able to introduce custom tags, the "baroque" value would be a value of a, say, "PERIOD" tag.

f) the usual TITLE, YEAR, TRACK, CD, etc tags.

As I said in my previous post, this is a sub-optimal approach but, given the limitations of current server and control point software, I do not think one can do much better. I hope I am wrong, of course. Best, nbpf

Nbpf, actually UPnP supports very advanced meta data which is completely customisable.

The challange is defined by what meta data the server decides to build its database with and what the client or control point searches on.

The usual suspects are typically now defined by the main tag names as used by MP3

http://help.mp3tag.de/main_tags.html

Thanks Simon, this is good and bad news!

Good because, if the UPnP protocol supports customizable tags, it is easy to implement servers that build their databases according to whatever tags a user specifies and control points that search on whatever tag the server has used to build the database.

Bad because, in spite of such flexibility, designers of UPnP servers and control points seem to insist on imposing non-customizable and very primitive views of music collections on the end users.

Yep.. Welcome to world of software interoperability