Music Player 6 - Scanning

I have kept my AV setup as close to each other as possible. My media is on USB HDDs attached to my Zidoo Z9X. I can access those disks via Zidoo's Samba from my PC whenever I need. I never felt a priority to buy a NAS device. Even though that is the right way to do an AV hardware setup.

In addition to MP working efficiently now. I got Home Threater 4.0 working first and it is excellent with all the nice pictures. It is really worth the effort to get it running. And especially as it is easier than MP. Somehow I like the Kodi video player features more than the stock video player of Zidoo. But HT is far superior and flashier than Kodi.

@rozel
I dunno how much you have tried to restore your network NAS shares. There is only 2 things you can look at. Your network connectivity, and the NAS services. Assuming your network is fine, the usual things you can do is to get into your NAS setup menu, and restart the daemon services. Restarting the NAS via the setup menu usually restores its defined share services. If the situation is a lot more serious then you may need to look at your NAS vendor for assistance.

 

Thanks for that. Things are not as bad as I first feared and my shares are still intact. My Music Nas is a ReadyNas Duo V2 which has given me excellent service since getting it years ago. Seems the latest Windows 10 20H2 update screwed with my PC's File Explorer, resulting in it not appearing at all in the network. The good news is that my Zidoo still sees it and after raising this issue in a Netgear Forum, the simple solution was to create a desktop shortcut to the relevant folder storing my music, using its ip address and voila! job done I only need PC access to transfer files to and from this folder which I can now do again. Seems it was something to do with SMB1 - how many times has this cropped up on these forums? lol!

 

@Larry Lo Good guide! Unfortunately this is undoable for me and will never work: Far too much work to condition my library.

So for me it should work via using Media Center for album selection and getting the information from the way folders and files (=tracks/titles) are named plus getting tagging information from those files.

1. MP will use the folder name as the Album name. The format should be "Artist - Album Name". Mine is done like that but: Various Artists indicates collection albums => Artists in filename!
2. The most ideal media Track format is Artist - Album name - Track. You must be kidding as that is far too long for filenames. Use "Seq No - Title" and "Seq No - Artist -Title" for collection albums.

Plain and simple.

 

My physical file/folder structure is plain and simple to me too, (literally) Music / Artists / Artist Albums / Artist Tracks

In response to your two concerns...

One. I am referring to the Album Name. MP will take whatever Artist Album folder name you have as the displayed Album. For example: I have a folder called Michael Jackson and inside is my collection of Michael Jackson 1979 - Off The Wall, Michael Jackson 1982 - Thriller, Michael Jackson 1987 - Bad.

I have a bunch of Various Artists albums too. I have not tried them yet. I think the way I am going to tackle that is to just create a folder Music / Various Artists. Then stick the albums inside. I am pretty sure MP will do its best to scan them.

Two. What I quoted is MP's most ideal media (file name) format. If you read beyond that statement in my guide, MP does support a whole lot more file formats. Including what you have indicated at the end of point one, and those at the end of point two. The Zidoo Music Player scanning is very flexible and can support a LOT of file name formats. You only have to rename those files with hyphens, and those which are very unclear. And if you do not, that is where MP can crash out, or not have a good match.

If you have read my 3rd guide post (above), you can easily test any Artist by adding multiple sources to your Artists. Using the example Artist here, add a source for Music / Michael Jackson to just scan Michael Jackson (collection). Add sources as you need.

Basically you will know once you have given it a try. Start small with one source for one Artist.

 

I need to point out that my primary music storage is physically on my PC. My backup is physically on my AV media storage. It is where I am playing around setting it up with my better sound system. I am sure that everyone will have their own storage concepts, and reservations.

Correctly Populating the Album Title and Album Artist for MP

I have tried a few newer folder naming formats layouts, being a lot more adventurous with the MP Better Setup Method. I have noticed that one (and a variation) of the filename formats populates the Album Title and Album Artist correctly. To my surprise, that is...

The format is Year Album Artist - Album Title (Year) / Album Tracks

For multi-CD albums, the format is Year Album Artist - Album Title 3CD / Album Artist - Album Title CD# (Year) / Album Tracks

(I am using a 3CD example here. CD# represents CD1, CD2, CD3.)

It also works without the leading Year ie Album Artist - Album Title (Year) / Album Tracks

There are some limitations for both the Album Artist and Album Title. I will try and summaries what I have found:

• The populating processing is from left to right. It appears to work well for characters in the A-Z range, number digits in the 0-9 range, and the apostrophe (') to a certain extent.

• Special characters, including an extra space, full stop (.) character, will stop the processing. Be prepared to edit out the special character(s).

• The ampersand (&) appears to be a separator (of some sort). Let me highlight with an example, for the artist Kool & The Gang, will end up as 'The Gang' for the Artist Name. As for the Album Title with the same album title as the Artist, it stops at the ampersand, and show 'Kool' as the Album Title. The solution appears to be editing the ampersand to 'and'.

• Artist compilations albums that have (full) years in them or live concerts, will not show up in the Album Title. So for example, The Best of 1970-1999, will only show as 'The Best of'. Concert 2015 will appears as just 'Concert'.

• The Album Title will not show CD#. Processing stops when it sees CD#. (I suspect it will be the same for Disk #). However MP, mostly, inserts albums in the processing order. Most of my collections appear with the last Album showing first (ie in reverse CD order). This is kind of annoying. You can verify this when you enable the Show Path feature.

• By default, if MP cannot populate the Artist Name, it will insert the folder name as the Album Title.

Strangely, I found that MP can handle about 90% of the Chinese titles that I have. As for the other 10%, they dropped into the default handling category. I totally have not got a clue on how, or why. I guess it should be the same ratio for my Japanese and Korean titles too.


MP3 Tags, and the specifying the Artist in the Track Name

One of my Artists had no MP3 tags, or very little info. Most Tracks had only the song name for its file name. Music Player really struggled during the scanning. Music Player crashed out each time. The Re-Matching for some songs had no song name and no artist, this is even though I can see all the info the file path. MP does not look in the path.

After editing in the correct MP3 info tags (with foobar2000), the scanning process went a lot more smoother, and can now complete every time. The Re-Matching had no Artist filled in. It was not perfect.

After inserting the Artist name into the Track name of a couple problematic albums. The scanning and Re-Matching was even better.

This means the MP3 tag info does play an important role.



My Opinion on MP with Correctly Operating Album Artist and Album Titles

The Album section, (only) looks good. It really does little for me.

With the new 2nd My Collection of about 16 Sources ie 16 physical Artists, 400 Albums, probably 4500 songs. I do not like the fact that I am having a difficult time finding albums of a particular Artist. I am too used to grouping by Artist (with sub-grouping by Album Year).

The Sort by Year in the Album section does not work. I have not got a clue where it populates this info.

Having the Year in front of the Artist for the folder name is good. It provides a certain level of sorting, visually in the Artist collection folder, also those albums which fall into the default category will appear near the top of the Album list (sorted Title A-Z). I can even see the effect of the Artist Albums of 2000, which is not that useful for my listening pleasure.

Without the Year in the folder name, you will have to find the defaulted Albums, where they are arranged alphabetically by Artist. As for in the Artist collection folder, it is literally sorted by Album Title order (a bit messy for my tastes).

What I want the most is MP working the way I listen to Artists. For that, I need grouping Artist Albums together, and preferably by Artist Year.

I think I need to have a think of what is better for me based upon what MP has to offer as of now.

 

Music Player / setting /

ONLY use local data

for me now the scanning go without error!