Genre and Recently Added

Support
1

Hi,

I’ve been using Serento almost from day 1 and generally I’m really happy using the app. The layout is good and the the various ways of selecting and playing music is great. I however have a couple of issues with the app…

Genres - I have 30 different genres configured across my albums, which has taken some time to get them just how i like them to find the music I want. I’m a bit concerned that Serento seems to mash those 30 genres down to 8.

You said on the Audiogon forum “Serento now reports exactly the genres your server reports. If your server says you have 88 genres, you get 88 genres, with the names it uses.”. Is this still the plan? If so is there any timescale to implement it?

I have found that I can use the Folder view to display all my genres, but even that has an issue as it seems to make one genre an album. Even stranger is it takes the genre picture in the Minimserver indexArtwork folder for that one genre.

Recently Added - The app doesn’t show recently added albums. On the home screen, where the title is ‘Recently Added’ most of the albums it shows haven’t been added in the past couple of years.

In Album view I assume that the little up/down arrows at the top can be used for sorting albums. If I sort via Recently Added it doesn’t show any albums that I have recently added to the library. Actually, the same applies to Recently Played and Most Played.

I’ve used my old Control app, in folder view, and Genre, Recently Added and Recently Played all display as I would expect. I assume this is using Minimservers algorithm and my tags, and Minimserver are configured correctly.

I hope these few issues can be rectified as I really do like the app.

2

Hi Gaz.

I’m glad you enjoy Serento.

Regarding the genres here’s how Serento handles them:

  1. It uses the upnp:genre split option to create a list of your genres. Go to Settings - Libraries - Select your server by pressing the gear icon - go to Metadata and Sync Options and check or uncheck upnp:genre. I like it with the option unchecked because this way it gets all the genres. Make sure you do another Sync Data after you change the option value.
  2. It uses the list of genres provided by the server and it matches them against a taxonomy of hundreds of genres. The taxonomy contains a hierarchy of genres. Imagine that a top level Genre is Rock with child genres being Progressive Rock, Metal, Alternative Indie, etc. This allows Serento to create a better user experience in the Genres tab.

If I were to only use the genres in your tags you would get a flat list of genres with no relation between them and the experience is less than ideal. However, I have thought about it and I’m going to give the option to use exactly the genres your server provides without any taxonomy. If this is the experience you want to have than you will be able to enable that in the future.

Recently added

Serento reports what the server says it’s recently added. It does not figure out by itself which albums are added recently. Unfortunately, each server has it’s own implementation of what’s recently added. I’ll give you an example. If I change a tag in one album that was added years ago, MinimServer considers that recently added. It should look at the added date not the modified date, but alas, it does not. Furthermore, MinimServer exposes only 16 albums in the recently added container, which is, in my opinion, not great. Since I cannot look at the physical files on your hard drive, I cannot read the added date property of the file and I cannot create my custom list of recently added. I can only show what the server says.

In album view, it’s the same story, it all depends on what the server says is recently added.

Regarding recently played, you are right. There seems to be an issue with that sorting options. I have already identified the issue and I will provide a fix for it in the next update.

Most played requires 30 days of playback in order to have data to use. Maybe it’s a little too much and I can reduce it to a week. Would that be ok with you?

Support for indexArtwork is coming in the next version. I made a concious decision to not implement it but it seems that it is something that people want so expect it soon. Serento shows a folder as an album if the folder contains any audio files. If your genre folders contain audio files it assumes it’s an album and it uses the image in that folder as the album cover.

indexArtwork will allow Serento to use the artist images you have added to your music folder and not download artist images over the internet, as it does right now.

Hope this helps.

Lorin.

3

Hi Lorin,

Thank you for the quick reply, much appreciated.

Genres

As I use multiple genres, e.g. Rock; Soft Rock, on quite a few albums I had the upnp:genre option checked. Here’s what I did:-

  • Unchecked upnp:genre and did a rescan. This made no difference to the genre view.
  • Checked upnp:genre and did a rescan. This also made no difference to the genre view.
  • I’ve been using ; as the delimiter so I tried adding / and did a rescan. This also made no difference.

Perhaps I should have mentioned this before, but since the last update I notice that after a rescan the app says I have 71 genres. Previously it said the correct amount - 30.

If you can add an option to use Genres without Taxonomy that would be perfect. I’ve created genres to suit myself, which probably don’t easily fit into others.

To be honest I very rarely use Most Played so I’m happy for it to be left as it is.

Recently Added

I assume the server (Minimserver) is providing the correct information about recently added/amended albums. As I noted, my previous control app does show the correct albums under recently added, using exactly the same server as Serento (Minimserver).

Using the folder view in Serento I selected Recently Added under Folder for Browse. Now when I go to the Folders view it shows the recently added albums I would expect to see. Unfortunately I can’t leave it like this as I’m using the folder view for genres.

Great news about indexArtwork being added. Will it also allow Genre images to be used or just Artist?

I was a bit confused where you say about my genre folders containing audio files. As far as I’m aware I do not have any genre folders, genre is just a tag within the audio file.

Sorry to be a pain :pleading_face:

Kind regards

Gaz

4

Gaz, don’t worry about it.

I’m happy you are telling me all this because this only make Serento a better product which is what we all want.

Yes, indexArtwork can be used for genres as well.

When you access those genres, do you see your albums? Do you also see sub genres? If the answer is no, than do this: go to your MinimServer’ settings - Properties - Advanced - tagFormat and paste this: genre.displayFormat={}. Save, restart and in Serento do a other sync.

If you see albums then don’t make this change.

I will look into all the problems you mentioned and I’m sure I’ll come up with solutions. I need to gather some diagnostics first from my server and I’ll keep you posted with the progress.

Thanks for your patience.

Lorin.

5

Hi Lorin,

I do see my albums under the genres but they are just grouped together. For example I have genres Pop - 60s, Pop - 70s, etc, so I can find music from different decades (not the year the disc was actually made). These are all just lumped under the Pop genre.

Kind regards

Gaz

6

Oh, I see what you mean.

Yes, the behaviour you see in Serento is expected. For custom genres, such as yours, I need to implement a new feature.

I’ll add it to my To Do list. Thanks!

Lorin.

7

@Gaz Can you tell me the aspect ratio of your genre images? Are they square, or 3:4, 4:5, 16:9? Do they contain text naming the genre? And if so, where is that text placed? Serento has an unique way of displaying genres using a mosaic of different size panels. Most probably I won’t be able to use this style with custom genres.

8

Hi Lorin,

All my genre images are square, 800 x 800 pixels. They all have text in the centre with the name of the genre. I’m happy to change this format if it makes things easier.

Incidentally, for indexArtwork I’ve followed the MinimServer format of having two folders in indexArtwork - Artists and Genre, each containing the relevant artwork.

Thanks

Gaz

9

Hi Lorin,

A bit of an update…

I’ve been trying to find why Serento is doing a couple of odd things. I think I’ve found the answer to one but not the other.

Too many genres - I have 30 different genres across my albums, however, quite a few albums are tagged with multiple genres using ; as a delimiter. If I scan using Asset UPnP as the server it says I have 30 genres. If I scan using Minimserver it says I have 71.
It seems Serento / Minimserver is treating each multiple genre as a separate genre, e.g. Pop; Rock is one Pop; Group is one, etc, it then adds up to 71. This is with ; selected as the delimiter in settings. I hope that makes sense.

Genre thinking its an album - As i mentioned before, if I select Genre in the Folder for Browse setting I can see all my genres in the Folder view except “Easy Listening”. This genre it lists as an album. I only have 14 albums with the Easy Listening genre, four of these are listed as complete albums under the Easy Listening ‘album’, the rest are listed as CD 1, CD 2, etc. I’ve looked at all my tags for these albums and cannot find any issues. In Album view they are all listed correctly. I do not have either an album or artist called Easy Listening so I cannot figure why its doing this. As you are looking at the way genres are used in Serento this really isn’t important, I just like to know why things are doing what they are :roll_eyes:

Regards

Gaz

10

Hi.

For the first issue, it depends on the upnp:genre toggle. Check results with it on or off.

For the second issue, I think I now understand what is happening. Serento does the following things when accessing a folder:

  1. It checks to see if there are any subfolders to list them on top.
  2. It checks if there are audio files in the folder to make it into an album.
  3. It checks if there is a multi disc album in there. So it looks for folders like CD1, CD01, CD 1, CD 01, etc. If it finds that then it considers that folder as being an album with multiple discs so it shows the album view instead of the folder structure. From what you are saying it seems you have CD 1 as a folder inside your genre folder. That would explain the behaviour. I suggest you rename the CD folders if it’s ok with you.

If you want to help me further do the following:

  1. Go to Settings.
  2. Go to Logs.
  3. Turn on logs.
  4. Use the app normally. Navigate in folders, do a sync with both servers, play some music, etc.
  5. After a while go back to Settings - Logs - and press the Send Logs button. This will send me an email with some logging information which can help me figure out what is happening. After you press send you can turn off the logs if you like.

Lorin.

11

Hey Gaz,

I’m happy to say that the next version of Serento has custom genres. Once enabled, you need to run a sync with the server and it will use your own genres along side your genre images. Just make sure you set indexArtwork=folder in serverOptions in MinimServer.

Also, you can use your own artist images if you have them. It requires the same setting as genres. Artists and composers will use the images you have and for the artists you don’t have images for it’s going to download them as it does now. The beautiful thing is that you can switch between your genres and Serento’s genres at anytime, without a new sync.

I’ve investigated the recently added issue and as far as the server goes, it answers with a maximum of 1000 recently added tracks. 1000 tracks divided by an average album length of 12 tracks you get about 83 recently added albums delivered by MinimServer. There is no other way to extract more than this and even this number requires a change in MinimServer’s settings. In serverOptions you need to add recentAdded=1000 alongside any other option that you have like indexArtwork=folder.

I hope you like it.

Lorin

12

Hi Lorin,

After much testing yesterday I think I’ve resolved the two issues about which I originally posted…

Too many genres - as I noted, whenever i did a resync the genre count was 71, when I only have 30. After I’d being using the app for a couple of days I turned off Serento iCloud in the iPad settings. This left some data on iCloud and at the time I turned iCloud off I was probably not using the ; genre delimiter. I assume that when you do a resync the app reads data from iCloud. When I deleted the old data on iCloud and did a resync the genre count immediately showed 30.

If Serento does always read iCloud data upon a resync it may be worth having an iCloud on/off switch within the app, and if it’s turned off any existing iCloud data is deleted.

Anyway, I’m pleased to say this is resolved.

Genre thinking its an album - some albums within the Easy Listening genre were being shown as tracks not whole albums.

I have a number of albums which have the prefix DM -, e.g. DM - Easy Sunday, DM - Lazy Days, etc. I deleted all these albums from my library and then added one back at a time, doing a resync after each. I found that I could add about 3 albums back to the library and they would all show up correctly within the Easy Listening genre as whole albums. However, when I added the fourth album all of the albums with a DM - prefix would get consolidated as one album and show as follows:-

CD 1

01 - track name

02 - track name

CD 2

03 - track name

04 - track name

etc, etc

To cut a long story short, I replaced DM - in the album name, and folder name, with Daily Mirror -, e.g. Daily Mirror - Easy Sunday, Daily Mirror - Lazy Days. I did not change the folder structure at all. Once I’d renamed the albums and did a resync they all showed in the genre correctly. I have no idea why this made a difference but I’d rather not rename my albums.

I have other albums with a DM - prefix in other genres, e.g. Pop, and they are no problem at all.

One last thing…

I have an album named The House Collection, Vol 2. Serento would only show the album name as The House Collection,. It would cut off the Vol 2. I have many albums with a suffix of Vol. x which work fine. I noticed the only difference was they all have a full stop after Vol. I renamed the album to The House Collection, Vol. 2 (notice the full stop) and Serento now shows the full name.

Does Serento do some form of syntax or spell check on the tags? If so, is that wise? I’m quite OCD about my library structure and tag naming but some people may not be.

Sorry about the long post.

Kind regards

Gary

13

Hi Lorin,

I’m not too concerned about how many Recently Played albums are shown, 20 is probably plenty.

The problem is that on the Home screen or using the little up/down arrows on Album view don’t show any recently added albums. I’ve not worked out what algorithm they are actually using.
As I can now use the Genre view I’ve set the folder view to show recently added albums, which it does correctly, so I’m happy. However, future users may question why they cannot see recently added albums.

Regards

Gaz

14

Hey Gaz!

I just released the new version. Can you try it out and see if it has fixed the issues?

Thanks!

Lorin.

15

Hi Lorin,

Thank you for the update and all the work you are putting into this, it’s much appreciated.

Unfortunately, I have good and bad news…

Recently Added - Perfect

Recently Played - Perfect

DM naming - Perfect. I renamed the problem albums back to DM - and they all show under genre as they should,

Album Artist Artwork - Not working. I did a rescan of both Minimserver and Serento but still no artwork appeared.

Serento / Minimserver is obviously seeing the indexArtwork folder as all my Genres images are being used, so I tried the following tests:-

  • I added some artist artwork directly into the indexArtwork folder and did rescans, no improvement.

  • I created an AlbumArtist folder, put some artwork into that and did rescans, no improvement.

Using ‘folder view’ with the Lumin control app shows all the correct Artist and Genre artwork, so that seems to indicate that Minimserver is sending out the artwork.

I also tried running Enrich Data to see if that would pick-up my artwork, but unfortunately not but the Artist enriched data does look much better than before.

I’m afraid I have another suggestion. Would it be an idea to allow a user to select what data they want enriched? For example, I already have an album and know if I love or hate it so I do not need the album reviews, other people may love reading them. The same goes for artist bios, I would probably never read them, others would. Being able to select just what data you want to download would speed up the process and save storage.

I hope you don’t think I’m criticizing, I think the Enrich data function is brilliant and don’t know of any other app that does it.

Kind regards

Gary

16

Hey Gary,

I’m glad some of that effort was in the right direction but this Artist images issue baffles me. I don’t quite understand what’s going on because my folder structure is exactly as yours.

Here’s how I tested:

  1. Went to the MinimServer configuration, in Properties - Advanced - serverOptions: indexArtwork=folder, recentAdded=1000. The indexArtwork=folder is really important.
  2. Went to my music folder that MinimServer uses as contentDir and created the indexArtwork folder. In it I created the following folders: Artist, AlbumArtist, Genre, Composer. In indexArtwork/Artist and indexArtwork/AlbumArtist I placed the images for my artists.
  3. Went to Serento and ran a sync with the server.
  4. My artist images appear.

Can you confirm that you followed these steps?

Also can you make sure you have the latest version of MinimServer installed?

If you did, can you send me a new log file just like last time? Make sure to run a sync before sending the log file.

Thanks!

17

Hi Lorin,

I’m really embarrassed and owe you a massive apology.

I found the problem when I was adding the new folders to IndexArtwork. Do you see the mistake there? I had indexArtwork with a capital “I”. When I changed it to a small “i” the artist artwork appeared. Just to make sure that was causing the problem I deleted the new Composer and Album Artwork folders and everything was still okay.

What I really don’t understand is why the Genre artwork, and Lumin app, didn’t worry about this.

Sorry for wasting so much time with this but I guess it’s useful information in case future users have the same problem.

Many thanks for your patience.

Gaz

18

I’m glad you figured it out.

Yes, the MinimServer specifications state indexArtwork is with a lower i. I do not know what the other apps do in order to make this work. But if the new naming works with Serento and the other apps I suggest you leave it this way.

Have a great weekend!

Lorin.

19

@lorin.bute do you have a link to the genre taxonomy which is used when custom is off?

I’m gradually adding more genre data step by step, but it’s a real pain - all attempts at a bulk solution are failing so it’s an as and when fix.

My current setup has:

  • 1960s
  • 1970s
  • 1980s
  • 1990s
  • 2000s
  • 2010+ Post Digital Era Pop
  • Neo-Classical
  • Classical
  • Jazz
  • Progressive Rock
  • Chilled Electronica
  • DJ Electronica
  • Drum & Bass
  • Trip Hop
  • Funk
  • Blues
  • Musical
  • Score

If I switch off custom genres then this happens;

  • 2010+ Post Digital Era Pop gets subsumed into Pop
  • Progressive Rock shows in Rock and as a Subgenre of Progressive Rock
  • Blues stays as it is
  • Jazz stays as it is
  • Funk stays as it is
  • Musical becomes Musical Theatre
  • Drum & Bass becomes an Electronic subgenre
  • Chilled Electronica and DJ Electronica merge into Electronic
  • 1960s - 2000s and Trip Hop seem to vanish

If I can understand the taxonomy I’m hoping I can make some tweaks to the names globally so they pick up differently and I can make better use of it, for example:

  • If I add “ Pop” to the end of the decade genre names will they all go into Pop (good starting point). I think that’s what @Gaz had?
  • If I rename Neo-Classical to Neoclassical will it become a Classical Subgenre? Currently it’s all munged together. This could be a desirable feature enhancement actually if that’s the case, so the app regards both those Genre names as the same.
  • Is Trip Hop a Hip Hop subgenre and it’s not appearing because I haven’t tagged any Hip Hop yet?

(There are many more questions but if I had a reference I could probably figure most things out)

Yours,

Keith

20

Hi Keith,

I have some similar genres to you, e.g. :-

Pop - 60s

Pop - 70s

Pop - 80s

Musical

Soundtrack

Pop

Rock

Rock & Roll

There’s more but every genre is shown separately in Serento with Custom Genres on. I also have different artwork for each genre in Minimserver indexArtwork which is being used.

When I first started using the app the genres were all mashed together. Lorin kindly introduced the option to use our own genres and ever since everything has been fine.

Do you have custom artwork for your genres? Perhaps Serento needs this to be able to present them all.

Regards

Gary