Okay, this can be done, but in a slightly limited way. In the drop-down that says +\Album, change Album to Album by Release.
This does order by release date, but most recent first, and it prefaces the album name with the year. I think I’d prefer it to have oldest first (and not display the year).
I tried this and found the same thing - it annoyingly shows the year next to each album, and will only list them with the newest at the top. There’s a workaround mentioned on the forum, but it involves adding a special tag to every file.
But I’ve also noticed that for albums which have incomplete metadata and thus have no ‘year’ data, they don’t show up at all.
This results in an entry under ‘album artist’, complete with a picture drawn from the embedded album artwork, but when I tap on it, all I get is the message ‘no results’. Whereas with Minimserver, any albums with no year data just show up alphabetically.
I think that, since I would apparently have to re-tag an unknown proportion of my collection to get Asset to work how I’d like(ish), while minimserver displays things mostly as I want it to, I’ll stick with minimserver. That’s not to say Asset is bad, it’s just that evidently my collection is tagged in a way which works ok for me with minimserver, but which creates problems with Asset, and I can’t be doing with sorting through it all again.
On a potentially more positive note, a tip for those who prefer to browse by album artist, rather than artist - there’s a tick box which tells Asset to fill in album artist tags with the artist tag info if the album artist tag is missing. Could help with slightly suboptimally tagged albums.
Just a post to say Asset is going well on the Synology, not that I expected anything else.
I do however have a question: I’m struggling to find a solution to a very minor ‘artist’ display issue in the Asset configuration browse tree. As an e.g. I have a number of albums from one artist, when I browse into the artist I see all the album covers, plus a number of the same album cover(s) where that artist has tracks duet’d with other artists. Not a problem in itself, but I would prefer to see only the actual albums, not the spurious tracks.
Apart from changing the metadata, is there a simpler way in config/browse tree ???
I’ve been working with dBpoweramp’s Spoon who advised to try browsing: Additional >> Album Artist / Album.
That worked as does Album Artist/Album on the top browse tree line. Problem is that any album with the Album Artist tag empty does not show. It looks like I had a few of those so had some work to do.
Big +1 for dBp’s PerfectTUNES ID Tags software. All the missing Album Artist tag’s have been added/restored. Only problem is browsing with Additional >> Album Artist/Album & Album Artist/Album does not show DSD albums.
More experimenting over the next days I guess
Mike I just updated from an R5 to the current R6 version of Asset on my QNAP nas, and seemed to immediately lose a ton of data which I’m guess is the Album Artist/Album data (??) I had been using the browsing tree settings recommended by HH on the old forum a year or two ago. I guess those were lost in the R5 > R6 conversion??
Hi Bart, OK but not sure as an Asset newbee that I understand all that entails, is it retrievable ? do you have a copy of the settings ? are they findable when the old forum archive is restored
I found them in the 2016 email from HH – I’ll try just editing again. Thanks!
I don’t have any issues with Album Artist appearing but it could be that I have a complete set of tags.
This is what I have at the top of my tree, I use almost all the time for non classical.
If your Album artist tags are not complete you can get Asset to use the Artist tag by checking the Fill missing Album Artist tags from Artist of Compilation tags
It’s worth loading up MP3 tag, sort by Album Artist to identify the blank ones, select all of these and create an action to populate the Album Artist from the Artist tag. It will only take 10 minutes to do this and will ensure that you have something in your Album Artist tag for each album.
I’m currently experimenting with a separate instance for classical music, trying to get a usable tree where you can quickly view by composer and get to the composition quickly. I’m almost there so may start a separate thread on this.
Hi Richard, many thanks for taking the time with your post. It’s spot on the right answer to my problem as posted yesterday morning.
Last evening working with PerfectTUNES ID Tags program I was able to go through my library & easily identify & correct all those with empty Album Artist tag’s. That has fixed my problem up to a point, everything is now view-able, but I’m still seeing all the album covers of albums with single tracks (duet’s & compilations)
Your suggested browsing tree top line “Album Artist/Album” does fix that problem, & its exactly what I’m looking for, but it does not show DSD albums. So deep diving into DSD metadata is the task for tonight.
Thanks again.
Glad to help Mike
Another nice thing to do with Asset is to enable upstream artwork. This chooses an image for each album at random to display in the root of each album artist. I like this as it seems easier to me to jump to an artist using an image rather than reading the name.
With some effortyou can go one step better than this by downloading images of your choice for each artist and placing them in a specific directory on your NAS. Then your artist image is fixed rather than being chosen randomly from your album covers.
To do this you need to use a program like WinSCP to allow you to navigate the NAS file system. Once connected you need to locate the AssetUserUpstreamImages directory.
On the QNAP it is here:
/share/CACHEDEV2_DATA/.qpkg/Asset/data/.dBpoweramp/uMediaLibrary-v4/AssetUserUpstreamImages
Then simply copy your images to the directory. They need to be PNG images and square to look right and the name need to exactly match the Album Artist name (case sensitive).
The images get loaded on startup so you need to restart Asset to get them to appear. With a lot of images it can take a minute or so to load up.
ATB. Richard
Thanks again Richard, I’ve just gone through all the DSD albums & found most had empty Album Artist tag’s, after a few clicks & copy/pastes using MP3Tag they are all now visible.
I’m already using upstream artwork.
Thanks for the tip on fixing the art but I need to settle down & get used to what I have & see what else is possible as I learn the basics.
Happy listening
Thanks, Richard, that’s really helpful. I might give that a try. The Asset forum suggested that selection wasn’t random but took the cover from the first ripped album for that artist. Of course your method does mean having to choose which cover or image for each artist.
That’s the way it works for me, maybe different on QNAP, but on Synology it takes the first album cover for that artist.
You are probably both right, it just felt like they were random!
Anyhow, I like controlling which image is shown, prefering pictures of the artists rather than an album cover, like this.
Very neat! I’m not sure I’ve yet got the time to seek out all the pictures but might do it with a handful of artists for whom the album selected grates on me as clearly not the most representative.
Slight thread drift: I have no problems with album covers except one, & I sorted it out a long while back while still using the Synology’s dumbo Media Server. ‘We’ have all the Adele albums & that morose ugly face on “25” was too much, so I embedded an other.
Hi Richard,
My music files are on Volume 1 on my QNAP so the AssetUserUpstreamImages directory will begin with /share/CACHEDEV1_DATA/etc.
Otherwise, many thanks for your tip.
Hi
i’m currently running Minimserver on my Qnap NAS. One thing i can blame is that you need to ask Minimserver to rescan your librairie when adding an album. with more than 4K CD it takes more than 1 hour…
Does Asset work the same way or does it scan permanently the librairie ?
when you add an album, how long do you wait before seing it in Nstream ?
You do not need to rescan with Asset, you see a newly added album straight away.
And its no longer called nStream, its simply Naim app
PS Asset UPnP operting manual … after initial installation scan “Asset watches the Music folder for changes and updates automatically.”
Are you really using N-Stream? It morphed into the Naim app a few years ago, so maybe time for an update!
To answer your question, I believe Asset will rescan automatically to update any new files you add.
