MinimServer can now show multi disc albums as multi disc

[paultaylor]

MinimServer has just released update 173 for MinimServer 2 and this has an important new feature regarding multi albums.

Up until this point MInimServer would show a multi disc album as a single contiguous disc unless all songs had a value for disc subtitle field set for all songs, that was the same for all songs on the same disc or the album title had disc n appended to each album title (with n representing the disc number). So if you wanted to see your multi-disc album as a single contiguous disc there was no problem but compromises had to be made to show as multi disc albums.

The logic behind this choice was that classical releases that span more than one CD can have arbitrary disc boundaries because of the limits of CD capacity that should not interfere with the music and should not be visible. This is true for some classical releases but not for for others and not really for Pop/Rock music.

But now with this new release MinimServer 2 can show all multi disc albums as multidisc albums with a simple option (need a full license or start trial)

Here is an example showing the old and new situation

1. Here we have an example 2 CD compilation album, with 17 tracks on the first CD and 19 on the second, all songs have discno and trackno set

   
   

2. However because there is neither a value for discsubtitle, nor is discno is appended to album title it is shown as a single 36 track album when using MinimServer with the defauilt MinimServer configuration

   

3. But if we add showAllDiscs=true to the Advanced tab within MinimServer and then Rescan

   

4. We now see the two discs separately within the album, with track numbering per disc

   

5. Its also worth noting that when SongKong has added a value for Disc Subtitle because the disc has a genuine title that MinimServer still takes notice of that and displays the disc subtitle (e.g Bop Art in screenshot) instead of the more usual Disc 1, Disc 2.

   
   

6. The only downside of this new option is there doesn’t appear to be a way of defaulting to showing multi disc albums but being able to override for one or two albums that you do not want to show as multi disc

7. If you decide to use this option and are currently using the approach in SongKong of adding discno to album title it makes sense instead to set Filenaming:Multi Disc Releases back to Never add Disc No to the release title so that your album titles are consistent for every track over all discs