Thanks Peter .. I really do appreciate the time you put into your explanations, and my head still spins at trying to imagine the complexity of the coding that must go into trying to accommodate all these different scenarios. Perhaps that's why I decided to become a mainframe computer Operator rather than a Programmer all those years ago .. hehe

Time for some actual music for the rest of the evening, and leave the galleries till tomorrow and later.

Cheers again

Russ

Just a quick note about using a M/Board with embedded graphics chip ..... I don't like them! It locks you into that performance for the life of the motherboard and there is no need for it, even in a dedicated music server.

Something like the Radeon HD4350 cards ( I use a HD3450 in mine ) are dirt cheap and most come with passive heatsink. An example is here ...

http://www.centrecom.com.au/catalog/product_info.php?sort=3a&products_id=36246

A HD3450 will be even cheaper if you can find one still in stock. Both have HDMI as you require.

I have simply used the drivers for the card and not bothered with the Catalyst Control Centre component.

Remember, the motherboard may not always be the basis for a music server, but may in the future be removed to become a games PC for example, and then you can simply put in a more powerful GPU as required.

Cheers,

Russ

Thanks again for your support on these issues. I think I've got my head around how the structure should be now. As I've been building up my library over the years I've changed my naming conventions along the way and it's now come back to bite me, but I'll get it sorted. I primarily need to keep in the back of my mind that " - " can have repercussions if used indiscriminately.

The "Expand to Music folders" and "Expand to Artist folders" in the embedded explorer on the left are something I had forgotten about. The latter should be particularly useful in identifying rogue albums.

Cheers,

Russ

A lengthy period of delta wave activity followed by a nice hot cuppa tea, and I think I now see where the issue lays. It is the use of hyphens in the names that is confusing XXHE now. Or perhaps more succintly, that XXHE has now heard that "unspoken word" and is acting upon it's decree .. haha.

Looking through the galleries created under 0.9z-3, it appears that things go wrong when the sequence " - " is used in either the album name, or used as part of the description for a multi volume set. It is now being interpreted as a separator to distinguish Artist component from Album component. This also appears to be the case where, in multi volume sets, the characters "CD" are followed by an " - " and then a description.

If this is the case , then that "unspoken rule" should be yelled out to the masses.

If you can confirm this to be the case, then we can all take this into account when naming folders.

re. usage of the tilde character in my case, I dont use it as a separator intentionally (as I now understand XXHE uses it), but rather as a way of breaking up the name into more easily read parts ( when appropriate ).

Again, if the tilde , when used in the form " ~ " rather than having NO spaces either side is also interpreted as a separator, we need to take that into account.

Would I be right in thinking the ever used "_" can be used with impunity? for example, rather that using something like:


\album name\CD1 - greatest hits in the 60's
\album name\CD2 - greatest hits in the 70's
\album name\CD3 - greatest hits in the 80's

if one used   

\album name\CD1_greatest hits in the 60's
\album name\CD2_greatest hits in the 70's
\album name\CD3_greatest hits in the 80's

it should be OK ?

I have a feeling that my much used Flash Renamer program is in for a big workout soon !

Cheers,

Russ

I need to have a think about your last post(s) after my brain has woken, as I'm not fully understanding what you are suggesting with the folder structure.

I have been using what I believe is a logical and orderly approach for years (see below) and hasn't caused problems until now. I don't necessarily want to introduce hyphens into the folder name to group both the artist and album name together, as that will in essence result in a huge list to scroll down when looking for a particular disc.

I have been using :

Artist Name \ Album name \ tracks

or

Artist Name \ Album name \ CD1 \ tracks
Artist Name \ Album name \ CD2 \ tracks

or

Artist Name \ Album name \ CD1 - meaningful description \ tracks
Artist Name \ Album name \ CD2 - meaningful description \ tracks

etc
etc

I have been using the tilde symbol for a while now to break up the album name where is it quite lengthy. I tend to use it quite frequently with classical albums where the artist or conductor plays pieces from several composers. It's just another handy character to use in addition to the normal (-) or (_)

I'm really kicking the cat out now

RGB

I'm used to walking with the vampires of late, so another late night isn't a problem.

I have attached 3 screen images.

The first ( galleries_before_09z-3.jpg ) show how the folder structure looks in both galleries and actual data using 09.zb. Data on right of screen

galleries_after_09z-3.jpg shows XXHE's galleries as they appear after 09z-3 has created things using the same actual data. Notice the start of the galleries now contains a mishmash of several boxset CD's listed together. This scenario is repeated further down the list.

galleries_after_09z-3(2).jpg shows multiple folder views of the gallery highlighting where CD's appear to have been placed one level up from where they should have been.

THAT I think is the underlaying issue. Where multi-volume albums exist, those CD's are being listed one level up in the heirachy.

re. the note you made about the bulk rename function. Yes, I have noticed it gets itself a little confused where multi discs sets show up. I'm working around that quirk manually, but if you have a fix, then great

Time to hang the garlic on the front door and load the silver bullets now     

Russ

hey Peter,

I've just plonked 0.9z-3 onto my video server (Vista 32), which doesn't get used for music much now, and decided to cleanup the galleries and replenish the small sampling of music albums I have on it. When it came to creating the galleries I noticed boxset albums and albums with more than one CD, appeared to all be listed under the main gallery folder, rather than under their respective unique artist name folders.

I then purged everything from the galleries amd removed the x-ref files from within the data folders and tried again using 0.9zb, which was the latest version still on that server, and everything behaved as I expected, with the individual boxset cd's appearing under the appropriate folder. In other words, it mirrored the file structure of the actual data itself, which is how it's been behaving since gallery creation was introduced.

Is this new way of creating the gallery folder structures under 0.9z-3 as you intended, or is it a bug? If it isn't a bug, what happens when two or more boxsets or multiple CD albums get processed that have the same name , eg CD1 or CD2 etc. Wouldn't the entries get all mixed up in the gallery folder? It will be very difficult to manually cull gallery entries, which is how I do it now, rather than using the inbuilt purge function from XXHE itself.

If the above is not clear I can produce some screen snapshots for you tomorrow.

Thanks,

Russ

ah ... umm ... senior moment here! I've always used the XX wallpaper function and it never occurred to me that anyone wouldn't want the coverart displayed while in un-attended mode. When that option is unticked all behaves as expected.

hmmm .. OK. I shall investigate why mine disappears.

ta

Every little bit helps 

That's a clever idea Mani. Then I thought to myself, the background disappears on my system when in UN-attended mode so this is really only useful for attended mode. Nevertheless, if those shortcuts are in your vision most of the time you will probably remember them more easily.

Russ

Listing in Post#1 updated to reflect changes introduced with 0.9z-3

Cheers,

Russ

Don't give up on that track so quickly IVO.

Try trans-coding it to re-write the header using something like Audacity ( http://audacity.sourceforge.net/ ) or even probably easier, dBPowerAmp ( http://www.dbpoweramp.com/ )

If you use dBPowerAmp, convert to plain 'ol WAV format, then see if that will play OK in XXHE. If it does, there is a good chance that when you use dBPowerAmp to convert it back to FLAC again, that the headers are written back correctly. Be sure to work on copies of the original file while experimenting.

Audacity will take a little more work, as you will need to learn how to save the audio file back in the format of choice, which could be either FLAC or WAV.

These approaches are usually successful in fixing mangled headers.

Cheers,

Russ   

I will assume you are using Vista. Other O/S's will be very similar.

Highlight the SFS.ini entry in the XXHE folder using the left mouse button, then using the RIGHT mouse button to bring up the context menu, choose the "Open With..." option. You may be presented with Notepad in the list that pops up already, but if not, in the section underneath called "Other Programs" you should find it there. If you see nothing in that lower section you need to click on the little arrowhead to the right of where the text "Other Programs" is written.

If you still can't find Notepad , then you can use the "Browse" button to navigate to where it is located, which is normally in the main "\windows" folder.

If you tick the box labelled "Always use the selected program to open this kind of file", then next time you want to edit the SFS.ini, you need simply double click on it, and it will open in Notepad automatically.

Give that a try.

Cheers,

Russ

Is it possible or logically feasible to load the coverart onto the desktop and have all processes associated with that completed prior to waiting for the user to issue the Alt-P command?

I was thinking it might alleviate the occassional glitches I still hear when ChangeWP and other processes are still active in the background and actual play commences.

Or perhaps I'm missing the point of loading the tracks but not playing them automatically.

Russ