Linn Forums

Hi

I just spotted that several albums were missing from my collection. On closer inspection, it seems that Twonky combines all the tracks from albums with the same name.

Example:
I have three albums called 'Chill Out': Black Uhuru, John Lee Hooker and The KLF. When looking in the Linn GUI under album name, I just see 'Chill Out' (containing all the tracks mixed up) and when looking on the Twonky web interface (or Kinsky PDA), I see the KLF sleeve (but all three album's tracks mixed up). Another key name which will suffer from this is obviously 'Best of' albums (just add the band name to sort it). Also found George Michael and Cure (both albums called Faith) and Bob Dylan examples too.

I'll go through my collection and start renaming things but though it worth mentioning. Incidentally, Slimserver doesn't suffer from this problem - nor any of the others listed below - it displays all three albums correctly; that's how I noticed the problem.

So that now makes Twonky faulty in all the following areas:

Album names: cannot distinguish between albums of the same name
Disk grouping: doesn't work (mixes up tracks from different disks of the same set; i.e. double albums need different names per disk)
Album art (Folder.jpg): buggy (can't deal with punctuation or ‘&’ in path)
Album art (embedded): buggy (I think it’s punctuation in the track names)
Album art: only shows 100 per 'container'
Composer tags: not recognised
Album Artist (Band) tags: not recognised
Rescan: buggy (rebuild option works OK though)
Web interface (Firefox): With Album Name ABC=3 selecting a letter usually doesn't open the page showing the albums, it downloads a m3u file containing over 1000 hyperlinks (such as http://192.168.96.11:8100/disk/music/O32...88333.flac). This used to be what happened when you clicked on the arrow as opposed to the letter.
Web interface (IE): Usually brings up a Windows Media Player (which I don't have installed) message: 'An internal application error has occured.
Playlists missing: Possibly related to the above issues?

As mentioned before, the only good thing about Twonky not recognising disk grouping is that it helps reduce the number of albums to keep you under the 100 limit for artwork. You can name a triple album (each with 10 tracks) into a single album (with 30 tracks) and set the disk IDs (1-3) using Mp3tag. That enables Slimserver to display them as 3 disks and Twonky to display it as a single disk. Sorting this out took me several days of re-tagging and it does mean 30~50 tracks under a single album; difficult if you just want to put disk 3 on!

Anyone spotten any more?

Bri

Should probably add

Versions prior to 4.4.9 don't handle Shoutcast radio (Shoutcast's fault admittedly)

Version 4.4.9 doesn't handle playlists correctly

Versions prior to 4.4.4 don't handle album-art at all

Does anyone know if MediaTomb can be:

1. Configured with a separate container for compilations
2. Has music tree level configuration capability (ABC=1 etc)

If yes to both, I’m going to try hacking it onto my NAS.

Bri

NB Does anyone know any downsides of Media Tomb (before I go to all the effort of working out how to install it) like NAS hibernation not being possible etc?

I use mediatomb at home.

Its main advantages over Twonky are,

1. Rescanning is reliable and it picks up changes quickly
2. The music tree is very flexible (but not easy to change if you aren't technical, i.e. it uses javascript files to construct the tree)
3. It's free!

Its main disadvantages are,

1. Cover art is only supported in mp3s (and only if embedded)
2. Music tree is only specialised at the last container, this prevents me from adding a complete artist's collection to the playlist if the artists is subdivded into albums. You can get around this by having the artist container just containing the tracks, but that is not great either....

Mediatomb will handle compilations and you can get the javascript to slice your stuff up based on alphabet.

David

Hi David

That's great; thanks very much indeed for the heads up. I understand the implications of what you're saying about the last container; I don't think that's a show stopper for me but I'll go have some coffee and a roll-up whilst considering if would impact any other selection facility I use It looks like Twonky or SkweezyDs are the only solutions for displaying cover art so I'll stick with Twonky for now and go sort out the tags for duplicate albums.

I'll get round to trying the Tomb one day soon though; just to see what it does. I'll not rush to get it working right now though as the art was really my main driver.

Thanks again
Bri

PS I wish someone would develop a proper media third-party server. I wonder how much work it would be to sort Media Tomb out such that it displays art? If someone could do that and make installation packages (like ReadyNAS addon's) for the most popular NAS's, I'm sure they'd sell well! I wonder if they could commercialise that in the same way that Red Hat charge for a Linux installation package manager?

Just found more 'jumbled up' albums: Red (both King Crimson and Black Uhuru) and two albums called 'Reggae Greats'. It's amazing how many albums I've found with the same name; I'd completely forgotten I had some of these albums!

Bri

Same here!

fyi, the copy issues are totally gone after disabling the automatic rescan... (-1)
Using the setting 120 and no issues what so ever.

Hi

That's great news and also see an idea posted here which might help; I've not tried it myself yet but will get round to it very soon. If it works, setting the rescan back to -1 would be a useful 'set it and forget it' option to use.

If not, it's probably best to set the rescan much higher than that as 120 means it will rescan every two hours which is a bit OTT; I've noticed that a manual rescan can also will generate the error, so it might still catch you out if it starts up whilst you are transferring files. I tend to use 0 and do manual scans, but you could set it to once daily (during periods when you are ripping lots of disks) then back to 0 once you're done most of the intensive ripping activities.

Bri

Hi

I've added a couple more 'bugs' to my initial list of Twonky issues in the first post. I'm going to write to Twonky complaining about these issues as I think this situation is getting pretty ridiculous.

Assuming nothing will be done about this (at least for a long time anyway) does anyone know which is the most stable out of the versions of TM which do handle art; 4.4.4, 4.4.5 or 4.4.6? I don't mind sacrificing internet radio for now as I don't really use it much anyway.

I'm thinking maybe 4.4.6 was the best of the bunch for my requirments?

Bri

I've had the doubling up of albums in the same way you have, Briain - I avoid it (at least with multi-disc compilations) by naming such CDs as:-

Deep Ska (CD1)
Deep Ska (CD2) etc.

Mick.