TMS 5.0.61 Upgrade disappointment

[petemahon]

Hi Folks,

I have been using TMS 4.4 for a long time (can't remember when I got it originally) and I absolutely LOVE it. Using a Philips SLA5520 with the Philips software is awful, so I found TMS to be a perfect alternative - ultra fast menu navigation etc.

I decided to purchase the licence for 5.* today and have been very surprised by the changes in the software - perhaps someone could help me with resolving some of the problems? My specs/hardware are as follows:

Win XP SP3
TMS 5.0.61
Philips SLA5520
Music only - > 50,000 mp3 @ insane rate.

The biggest changes for me are these:
1. In the navigation tree, Albums have disappeared. Now I cannot access albums except via Artist/Album or Genre/Album - this is the only way I accessed them before so is a pretty big change.
2. When I installed it the database creation took nearly 2 hours and used more than 1GB of disk space. This is WAY more than 4.4 and it seemed to redo this process when I accessed http://localhost:9000/webbrowse for the first time. If this is a one-off then I can live with it
3. On my wireless receiver, I cannot access compilation albums anymore. This is because the navigation tree does not have an Album Artist node, nor is there a list of Albums on their own,
4. There used to be an option to place the "The" from artist names at the end of the artist name, like "Who, The". Is this gone?

I would greatly appreciate any help you guys can offer me. I am not XML fluent but can navigate/edit a file if needs be.

Looking forward to hearing from you!

Cheers, Pete

[Briain]

Hi

Hopefully the below will help answer all your questions:

3. On my wireless receiver, I cannot access compilation albums anymore. This is because the navigation tree does not have an Album Artist node, nor is there a list of Albums on their own,

Twonky 4 had option to define compilations directory by name or absolute path. Twonky 5 has this but it's not accessible via the web interface. The default entry in the Twonky ini file is as below:

# compilationsdir
compilationsdir=Compilations,Sampler

If you name your compilations directory to either of the below, it will ignore all the artists but still show it in the albums container. This is useful if you have lots of compilations since it reduces your artist list to a more manageable size (i.e. to your single artist albums outside the compilations directory). If you wish to show all the artists, rename your compilations directory to something else (like Comp_Albums) and rescan.

I prefer to use both the album artist tag and the artist tag so I can assign an album artist to all my albums (and still use artist to look at contributing artists on my compilations). If you too use the album artist tag, I have published a replacement music tree which might be of interest to you. Save the original default.view.xml file and replace it with my one if you think it would be more suitable (if not, you can put the original back). Then rebuild the database to pick up the new tree structure and tags. NB The default.view.xml file is located in \resources\views

You can download the replacement xml file at the bottom of my post here

Please ask if any of this needs clarification.

Bri

4. There used to be an option to place the "The" from artist names at the end of the artist name, like "Who, The". Is this gone?

I believe that this has been raised as a bug and could be sorted in 5.0.65 (I haven't checked).

Bri

[mgillespie]

"The" filter is coming back in 5.1 It was removed because there were issues with it in 4.x

Looking forward to it, it's a small but important feature.

[Briain]

Just be sure to test it on a collection with 'The The' albums in it. In fact, I'm going to write to the The The and suggest they call their next album The The - The The The

[petemahon]

Afternoon folks,

If you name your compilations directory to either of the below, it will ignore all the artists but still show it in the albums container.

That's great - I've renamed that now. I have a few music databases (Mediamonkey, Subsonic Web Player and TMS) so they're still rebuilding!

I have published a replacement music tree which might be of interest to you. Save the original default.view.xml file and replace it with my one if you think it would be more suitable (if not, you can put the original back). Then rebuild the database to pick up the new tree structure and tags.

I tried that one and it was still building the database for over 10 hours. I quite like the default (supplied) view although I don't understand why the Albums tree was removed from v4 to v5?

I believe that this has been raised as a bug and could be sorted in 5.0.65 (I haven't checked).

Great - and I totally agree about The The! On some other DBs they sometimes show up as ", The, The" so that's the perfect test.

"The" filter is coming back in 5.1

Rock on!

Thanks all - renewing my faith in TMS already

Cheers, Pete

[Briain]

I have published a replacement music tree which might be of interest to you. Save the original default.view.xml file and replace it with my one if you think it would be more suitable (if not, you can put the original back). Then rebuild the database to pick up the new tree structure and tags.

I tried that one and it was still building the database for over 10 hours. I quite like the default (supplied) view although I don't understand why the Albums tree was removed from v4 to v5?

Hi

That's really quite odd, mine takes exactly the same time as the original (under 1 hour on a ReadyNAS with 16,000 FLAC tracks). I need the alpha-grouping (particularly with the album container as the alternative would be to load all covers from the collection; this just wouldn't work on a PDA control point) and I also need to use the album artist tags.

Enjoy the rest of the weekend! Actually, I've just noticed that there's only 24 minutes of it left so I'd better go and have a quick dram of malt whisky before the weekend runs out!

Bri

[petemahon]

That's really quite odd, mine takes exactly the same time as the original (under 1 hour on a ReadyNAS with 16,000 FLAC tracks).

Morning Bri,

Thanks for the tip - I don't know why but I ended up with nearly 250,000 folders and .idx files after leaving the database to rebuild with the XML file you suggested. Just can't figure it out. I deleted the whole default.view/1 folder (overnight!) and have reverted to the original which rebuilt the DB in an hour. Is it something I have in my collection which makes the folder count go up exponentially? I'm puzzled but nonetheless it's grand - I have my workaround!

One more question - and thank you very much for your help to date, I don't know why PV don't pay you - I have all my music in folders like this:
My Music/[ArtistName]/[AlbumName]/[Track,mp3]

My compilations are under
My Music/Various Artists/[AlbumName]/[Track,mp3]

Will renaming this folder to Compilations change the tree so that I can view those albums? How does TMS display those albums in the default view? Alternatively, can I add "Various Artists" to the .ini file so that I don't have to rebuild all my databases?

Sorry to be such a pain in the ass, I'm still learning!

Many thanks and Kind Regards,
Pete

[Briain]

Hi

You have to delete the contents of the drfault.view directory before changing the tree or it will get mighty large! Maybe the stuff left in here when you changed tree and rebuilt the database conflicted with the stuff generated by my tree and that is what caused the problems? I don't know but it is a possibility! In any case, with the NAS versions of TMS5 I've seen you have to remove the contents of the default.view befoer doing any database rebuild (even if you're not touching the tree) or it archives the old database first; this will soon add up to a lot of files!

I forget the absolute numbers but it seems TMS 5.0.5x creates a metafile for every media file and also mirrors the directory structure in which it then locates these metafiles. With my collection of 16,000 files it was about 50,000+ files and almost as meny directories within the default.view directory (it was about the same either with the original PV tree or with my own replacement tree) and with Netgear using a format of 16k block sizes, it adds up to 2.7GB of disk space. This is why the original PV version was breaking the ReadyNAS; it only has a 1.9GB OS partition and 500MB of that was needed for the Linux files!

As to the compilations directories, with Twonky 4, I used to put all my compilation albums in a directory called Compilations. With anything in the compilations directory, Twonky 4 did not add the artists to the artist list. The reason for this is that if you have a lot of compilations, your artist list will get so large (with single track artists) that it's harder to navigate to find artists albums. By example you might have 600 artists for 1000 single artist albums, but if you have a large collection of compilations, this list might expand to 6000 artists. By ignoring the compilation artists you can reduce the list back to 600.

The better way to do it is to use the album artist tag for all albums. You'd then end up with a 6000 list of track artists but with a smaller list of album artists. To find an album, you look up albumartist/album as opposed to artist/album.

With Twonky 5.0.55, I have not tested the facility to ignore contributing artists for albums in the compilations directory (I use the album artist tags and thus don't need this facility), however, I've noticed that although this feature no longer appears in the configuration pages, the values are still in the twonkyvision-mediaserver.ini file (well, they are for the NAS version I'm using) and listed as below:

# compilationsdir
compilationsdir=Compilations,Sampler

This would presumably mean that you could call your compilations directory either Compilations or Sampler and the artists would be ignored for anything within it. incidentally, though the artists are hidden, the album names are not hidden, so you can still find and play your compilations by the album names. As I say, these are in the 5.0.55 ReadyNAS ini file (as shown above) but I've not tested them. Also, I don't see them in the Windows version (5.0.61) ini file so I've no idea if they're elsewhere or if they've been accidentally dropped (most likely they're elsewhere and I've just not found them for the Windows version; I've not looked very hard as I don't use it for anything other than testing new trees). I can't test 5.0.65 as there is not yet a version available for the ReadyNAS.

Hope that all sort of makes sense

Bri