[How to] change Twonky 6 menus (trees) in the new Qnap QPKG (and on other NAS's)

[Pediatrik]

I'm having some strange behavior from 6.0.34. After installing the add-on on my ReadyNAS Duo and your AlbumArtist trees Bri, Twonky suddenly makes a mess of the "Year" tag. The tags are ok in Mp3Tag, but Twonky suddenly places the majority (+1000) albums in the year "0000", none in "2011", one in "2010", one in "2009" and so on. It should be 30 albums in "2011", 65 in "2010" and so on. Unfortunately no change after rescan and rebuild. All other tags; AlbumArtist and so on are ok.

Any ideas?!

[Briain]

Hi

I almost never use the year container, so it's possible I've not checked it properly in 6.0.34 (though I think I did have a quick look). I'll look later today and get back to you; my NAS is off at the moment as I'm changing my comms room UPS mains wiring (well, really just a comms cupboard).

Bri

[Arnold]

I'm using 6.0.33 on a QNAP NAS with Briain's trees. Did a quick check and see also inconsistent behaviour with the year.

EDIT: did a little checking. It seems only to go wrong for FLAC files, but not all. Some albums are correctly placed, but most have no year info. Although the metadata is correct (checked with MP3TAG and dBpoweramp).

[Briain]

Hi

Well mine look all okay, but I do have an idea. I have taken care to tag all albums with a year entry such that the year is the same for all tracks. By not doing that, the album sill be scattered over several years. I do have a few (125) where there is no year entry at all, and these all appear under 0000 as expected.

I know Twonky have introduced a new algorithm to not show duplicate tracks where the track title and file size are identical, so I wonder if either that is causing an unforeseen problem with your collections, or whether they have introduced yet another new algorithm to ignore albums with different year tags on the same album.

I can't say how the Twonky tree has evolved since Twonky 5.1 came out (that's when they started the xml trees) as I've never used their own trees. I have had a swift peek at the code in the ones bundled in the 6.0.34 Qnap files and I was surprised to see there doesn't seem to be any year container for music; just one for pictures. That is interesting as it means that any odd happenings with years and music files would not be picked up at Twonky, but looking at my code, it is compliant with how they implemented it for Twonky 5.1 and as I say, I am getting no problems with it here.

I do foresee a problem here as since they don't use it themselves, there will be little incentive to fix it, but that said, if there is a problem then it could have unforeseen side effects, so it would be good to know about it and thus let them know too. The big problem is that I can't replicate it here without knowing what (in your tagging) is upsetting it. Could you please look at one of the albums (using MP3TAG) which is errantly ended up in the 0000 container and let me know what's in the year tags for every track? I'd need to know if they're all the same as each other (in that album) and what format the data tags are in (2006 or 2006 06 06 or something else) such that I can see if I can replicate it here on my test server?

Bri

[Arnold]

Bri,
It seems only a problem with FLAC files.
And, strangely, all FLAC files that have embedded art are okay with year. All FLAC files without embedded art are in YEAR 0000.
I know you only work with embedded art, so that could be the reason you don't have this problem.
There was a problem with embedded art in previous Twonky version, that PV has fixed. But perhaps this fix has raised another problem?

[Briain]

Hmmmm, that really is very interesting and as you say, I have no folder.jpgs at all. I've a bunch of test albums and will extract the art and see how it runs with both (I'd expect it will as T6 first looks at embedded whereas T5 did it the other way round). I'll then delete the embedded and see what happens here (be a little later this weekend). Thanks very for the update and well done for spotting the trend (I've alerted PV and told them that I'll be investigating it).

Bri

[Pediatrik]

Bri, I only have FLAC files and do not use embedded art. My collection contains 1132 albums, 16 is placed in correct year container, the rest in 0000. The 16 correctly placed albums all have minor faulty tags, mostly wrongly named file "James Taylor - 01 - Blow Up" instead of "01 - Blow Up". After correction all albums populate the 0000-container... All the tracks have the same year tag as all the others and they are in the 2006 format.

Frustrating since I often browse my collection using the Year-container. All help is appreciated!

[Briain]

I suspect that they'll not fix it as 6.0.34 will be the last Twonky 6 (and they're all flat out working on Twonky 7). It is a difficult one to press for as they don't even use the year container in the music part of their own tree (so the official Twonky will not have the bug). The key thing is that now we've found it, I can alert them to ensure the buggy bit of code is not carried over into Twonky 7.

Bri

[Pediatrik]

The funny thing is that the 6.0.23 I used, before "upgrading" to 6.0.34, did not have this issue with the Year tags. I just reverted back and voilà the Year containers are correct! Maybe something to pass on to the team working on Twonky 7...

[Briain]

Hi

I've tested it here and can confirm the below:

Embedded art only: everything is fine (which is why I didn’t notice it)
Embedded and folder.jpg: everything is fine (as I'd expected)
Folder.jpg only: All albums are shown in year 0000 (most odd)

Interesting that it worked in 6.0.32 as that means it is not related to the bug to fix parsing art from FLAC files (which was sorted for 6.0.32). I have sent PV an email outlining the problem and confirming I can see it here on the Windows version of Twonky (so it's a cross-platform issue).

Fortunately for me, I use embedded art, but it is a shame for others! You can use dBpoweramp music converter to embed large groups of albums with the art from Folder.jpg's in each folder. If you are planning to do that, it's a good opportunity to have a quick look to see if you are happy with the existing art prior to embedding it. I once did about 10,000 tracks (set it going and left it). I can't remember how long it took, but it would have taken a day or so as it was a very slow ReadyNAS I was using at that time; a modern fast NAS would be a lot faster, but it'll still take a while to run.

Bri