Do the various music servers (Minim, Asset, etc) treat Metadata differently from each other?

Meerkat posted:

The reason I ask this, is while I eagerly wait the arrival of the NDX 2, I am using a BlueSound network player. It pulls the music from my Qnap NAS, without using a music server.

I am in the process of re ripping all my CDs, and noticed that the BlueSound app, (which is actually very good ) would not display, a couple of albums correctly, or play them. It appears that the app doesn't like these [ ] type of brackets, in the album title.

I removed the said brackets using ID Tags from dbpoweramp, and the albums are now clearly visible, and will now play! The BlueSound app is happy with ( ) brackets, but definitely not [ ] brackets.

There are some 'characters' that servers do not like, but would Minim and Asset, treat [ ] brackets, or any other character, in the same way as BlueSound does, or even differently from each other?

I'd never thought about this before - I'd assumed that dBpoweramp wouldn't let me use invalid characters so have happily been using [ ], which Asset is happy with. I've yet to find a punctuation mark it's not happy with, though I believe the ? and * may give trouble when naming files (not in the metadata for the file) as they are usually wildcards in the OS so wouldn't give valid filenames. dBpoweramp appears to change ? to an upside down ? (sorry, I don't know how to to insert one here) when writing file names which backs up this idea (The ? still shows correctly in the metadata).

Meerkat posted:

The reason I ask this, is while I eagerly wait the arrival of the NDX 2, I am using a BlueSound network player. It pulls the music from my Qnap NAS, without using a music server.

I am in the process of re ripping all my CDs, and noticed that the BlueSound app, (which is actually very good ) would not display, a couple of albums correctly, or play them. It appears that the app doesn't like these [ ] type of brackets, in the album title.

I removed the said brackets using ID Tags from dbpoweramp, and the albums are now clearly visible, and will now play! The BlueSound app is happy with ( ) brackets, but definitely not [ ] brackets.

There are some 'characters' that servers do not like, but would Minim and Asset, treat [ ] brackets, or any other character, in the same way as BlueSound does, or even differently from each other?

It is of course possible that different UPnP servers enforce slightly different restrictions on file names and on metadata strings. These are not necessarily limited to the characters that are allowed or disallowed. Max. file name lenghts might also be different and certain UPnP servers do not support multiple entries for Artist, Composer or other metadata indexes. You'll likely find more precise information in the documentation of MinmServer and Asset than in this forum but, as a general remark, the difference in supporting user-specific indexes, remaming schemes, sorting schemes, etc. are much more relevant than the differences you are concerned with, in my view. I use MinimServer since more than two years and I do not have any reason for going back to a lesser UPnP server: Asset is good albeit less flexible than MinimServer; the UPnP server implemented by Naim is unacceptable to me and I have never seriously looked into the UPnP servers that are installed by default on QNAP and Synology devices. Have fun with the new NDX 2, it looks like an interesting device! 

Cheers TALLGUY...I'd often wondered why I had albums on my NAS, that were not showing properly in the BlueSound app.

Even more confusing, I have noticed that if I search the app under 'Artist', the offending albums with [ ], won't show properly, or play. If I search under 'Album', those with [ ] display, and play perfectly.

Perhaps this issue is unique to BlueSound software, I just don't know? Anyway, come my NDX 2, I'll be using Asset.