Behaviour of JPlay iOS and Minimserver on Linux

[swcng2001]

Merry Christmas everyone,

 

I'm a relative newcomer to JPlay on iOS and to Minimserver after having used JRiver and Roon for some time.

 

I installed Minimserver on an old Mac mini, which I reformatted for Linux Mint 21, and appears to be running perfectly.

 

I have a couple thousand albums on my disk which I used with with Roon and JRiver with hardly a hitch apart from usual metadata irregularities which I corrected over time. When I switched over to JPlay and MinimServer there were a few issues I ignored especially as I was a new user and unsure of how they behaved. The latest issue which really bugs me (coz I don't know how to correct it) is when I have multiple copies of an album each with different sampling rates and sampling formats. Each of the versions has the Album tag named with the sample rate added to the end of the album title string e.g. Ella Fitzgerald's album "Let No Man Write My Epitaph (DSD256)" and "Let No Man Write My Epitaph (DSD128)". On JPlay all these albums are not treated as separate albums but show up as in the following screen shot with all tracks from all albums sorted by track number and not by album then by track number as it should be! .

 

 

MinimServer configuration has not been changed since I installed it -

 

 

Any help in fixing this will be appreciated.

 

By the way, does anyone have a favourite Tag editor running on Linux? I tried Kid3, Pinky Tagger and Tagger. None of them come close to usability nor have an logical uncluttered interface like that of Yate on my Mac.

 

Thanks. Hope you all have a great New Year.

 

Stephen

[AudioDoctor]

You may not like this answer but here it is. To fix this problem you will have to edit the title of each album with a metadata editor to differentiate them from each other. This is exactly how I fixed this problem. There may be a way to solve this in Minimserver but I am unaware of it.

 

for example, I have Diana Krall (whatever album) 24/192 and Diana Krall (whatever album) DSD256 as the title.

 

Roon was, in effect, covering up this problem by using it's own metadata instead of your provided metadata.

[The Computer Audiophile]

If this is possible via MinimServer config, @stefano_mbp will know how it’s done. 

[swcng2001]

But I have done that as you can see in the Ella example above. I added the sample rate info to the album field enclosed in (). I've done this to almost every album that I have multiple copies of, and yet JPlay still displays them as one big album sorted by track #.

[swcng2001]

I’m hoping @stefano_mbp has the time to respond 🤣 or perhaps @marcin_gps. 
 

Thanks in advance guys.

[swcng2001]

I seem to have fixed the problem. It’s not enough to restart or rescan MinimServer. It’s also necessary to resynch on JPlay. Sorry for getting all of you to put on your thinking caps 😅

[stefano_mbp]

22 minutes ago, swcng2001 said:

It’s also necessary to resynch on JPlay

You discovered yourself, that’s it.

JPlay has its own db (like Lumïn app) that must be resynched each time you update and rescan with Minimserver.

Regarding the tag editor I have a very similar setup (Minimserver running on a Intel Nuc server with Ubuntu) and I use Yate on my MacBook.

I manage my library on a Master copy on Mac where I add and edit albums with Yate, then I synchronize it with the copy on the Ubuntu server using FreeFileSync, it takes just less than one minute for an added/modified album and thus I have an identical copy too for backup, then I synchronize the Master copy with a third copy on offline hdds (just to stay on the safe side)

 

[swcng2001]

@stefano_mbp, thanks.

 

Yes, it seems Yate is the way to go. 

 

👍 for maintaining copies & backups. I would like to use a NAS someday with mirrored disks.