Question for those who have a library of ripped music on a server. If you are ripping e.g. a five-disc set of Beethoven Symphonies with the XYZ orchestra conducted by ABC, do you treat the set as (i) 1 album (titled e.g. XYZ Beethoven Cycle) with discs 1-5 or (ii) 5 albums (titled e.g. XYZ Beethoven Symphonies 1 & 2, XYZ Beethoven Symphonies 3 & 4 . . . )?
If the former, have you ever had an issue with server and/or controller software playing Sym. 1 first movement, Sym. 3 first movement, Sym. 5 first movement . . . i.e. not recognizing the disc number field?
Thanks, but I’ve already tagged 1 TB of classical music (plus 700 GB of other music). I have a system that works for me. And fortunately I have other software that understands disc numbers.
Do you use Minimserver? If so, it offers various options for handling multi-disc albums. There’s a detailed explanation in the user guide — too long to reproduce here. But the most useful feature of Minim, at least for me, is the “group” tag which is particularly useful with multi-disc albums. For example, I have a boxed set of the Beethoven symphonies on 5 CDs. When I ripped it, each symphony was given the same group tag: Symphony No1, etc. Now, when I open the album in the Naim app, the first thing that appears is a list of the nine symphonies. Tapping on any member of the list allows me to play that symphony, or to open it so I can select individual movements to play. It works a treat for me and there are no problems with tracks out of order.
I downloaded the free version last year for testing. At the time I was having issues with my server, which I ultimately blamed on the hardware.
I’m pretty happy with JRiver/JRemote, although grouping would be a nice feature. I don’t mind scrolling through Beethoven symphonies, but it would be nice to have the 32 sonatas grouped, not to mention Haydn’s 62 sonatas.
Edit - It looks like JRiver would allow me to do that - maybe with a grouping tag (whose intended function is not clearly defined) or by creating my own tag. But I don’t see how it would be accessed on JRemote.
Minim definitely has a steeper learning curve than some other server software. I suspect it’s one reason Asset seems to be the most popular NAS server amongst forum members. But Minim was designed from the start with classical music in mind. I ripped my mostly classical CD collection as a retirement project, knowing I was going to be using Minim, which gave me time to learn as I went along. For anyone starting out, there’s a very helpful forum in which the developer Simon Nash frequently posts.