MinimServer with SongKong Part 10: MultiDisc Albums

Part 11: MinimServer Configuration
Part 9: Is Classical and other boolean fields

All Albums

MinimServer identifies songs to be part of the same album if they have the same value for the AlbumArtist field and Album field. 

By default MinimServer does this check at a folder level but if your albums are organized so they traverse multiple folders you can find matching albums in different folders by setting mergeFolderAlbums to true. But I would certainly advice that unless you have a very good reason you should organize albums so that each is stored in a different album folder that is within an album artist folder.

Multidisc Albums

The same applies for Multidisc albums but MinimServer is also clever enough to identify if you have each disc in a separate folder within a main folder without you having to set mergeFolderAlbums to true. You need to ensure the discno and trackno fields are completed as well, but they always are if identified with SongKong.

But by default MinimServer displays all the tracks on the release as if they are on a single disc.

So here we have actually have a 2 disc release, the first disc has 17 tracks and the second disc has 19 tracks but MinimServer shows it as a single 36 track release.

The reasoning behind this is that for Classical releases the work can sometimes bridge multiple discs and that makes playing a single work awkward. So removing the disc boundaries solves that issue.

But I want to show the discs

But where the bridging work is not an issue, it is often preferable to show the discs. This better represents the physical release that you are already familiar with, and breaks down larger releases into more manageable sections.

Configure the Album name

Earlier we said that the Album Name must be the same for all tracks, actually MinimServer does some special parsing of the album name that means that if extra per disc information is stored at the end of the album name that MinimServer will parse it and use it to display each disc.

SongKong can add this data automatically by setting the Multi Disc Releases option to Always add Disc No to the release title

Note that the album name now has (disc 1) added.

 If you rescan the files in MinimServer you can see the tracks are now grouped by disc with track numbers per disc. Also note that MinimServer parses the extra information added to the release title but does not display it (of course it would not really be able to in a sensible way since it is different for different discs).

Using the Disc Subtitle

There is another way to show a release as multi-disc albums and this is with the Disc Subtitle field. If the disc subtitle field has a value then the release is shown as multi-disc without having to make any differences to the release title field.

Some releases have an actual disc name rather than just Disc 1.. N. For these releases SongKong will automatically fill in the Disc Subtitle field such as this one which displays as multi-disc with MinimServer.

This usually makes sense since when releases have labelled their discs individually they usually can exist as standalone work. For example in this release the album Tolerance / Bop by Blue Aeroplanes is actually a compilation of two albums previously released called Tolerance & Bop.

SongKong doesn't use the Disc Subtitle field for multi-disc releases that don't have a disc title since that would not meet the metadata standards. But if you wanted to use this approach for all your releases you could manually enter data for this field with another tag editor such as Jaikoz.