virtual folders, based on tag: How do I......

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freemansteve
Posts: 24
Joined: Tue Apr 19, 2022 10:12 pm

virtual folders, based on tag: How do I......

Post by freemansteve »

Hi,
I'm new, and am enjoying UMS 10.19.0 on my PC.

I have a question that may have been answered many times, but I am not sure about the correct terminology to use for searches....
Apologies if this is all covered somewhere!

Setup:

- I have a NAS/RAID box that runs its own DLNA server, which works fine, for 3x Smart TVs, Cambridge Audio 75, VLC/Foobar2K on 3x PC and on 2x Android!

- Sometimes there is music on my PC (or videos) I want to access without booting the NAS/RAID, so UMS is what I use and it works excellently for that purpose, with ALL the renderers or controllers I use.

- All my huge music collection is fully and consistently tagged (MP3Tag tool) - I'm a bit OCD about this, so finding things is easy.

- A DLNA server basically uses a database that can be searched by fields or combination of fields, and the "views" presented I call "virtual folders" with knowing the correct term.

- Now, the "virtual folders" I see from my NAS/RAID box server on my controllers (N.B. some controllers are also renderers in one) are a similar set to those that I see with UMS on the same data files, but are not the same. For example, the top level starts "Music", "Videos", "Photos" or similar, but on selecting "Music", I get: Album, All Tracks, Artist, Artists Index, Artist/Album, By Folder, Genre/Album, Genre/Artist, Genre/Song, Playlist and more. Not quite the same on UMS, but realize these "constructs" are tantamount to database queries for sets of tags in fields.

The question:

- What in UMS controls the set of "queries" or look-ups seen by the controller, and how do I configure additional "virtual folders" (as I call them!) to build a query based on different combinations of tags or change the names of the 'folders'?

Here are the different "virtual folders" comparing my NAS/RAID and UMS...
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ums.JPG (21.15 KiB) Viewed 2738 times
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mik_s
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Re: virtual folders, based on tag: How do I......

Post by mik_s »

UMS does currently have a configurable Virtual folders but this is not based tags so it wouldn't do what you are looking for.

At the moment these 'Virtual' folders in the Media Library are hard coded so there is no way to customise them.
AFAIK these are just database queries so it should not be too hard to alter them if it was made possible.

You could make a request on GitHub to add support for customising this, If it is not too hard the devs may do it.
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freemansteve
Posts: 24
Joined: Tue Apr 19, 2022 10:12 pm

Re: virtual folders, based on tag: How do I......

Post by freemansteve »

Thanks!

At least I wasn't missing something that is obvious to everyone else... :)


I'll try to write a request on github.

It seems reasonable to me to be able to have say, a "Tag To Virtual folder" section in the .conf file, like

"vfolder_name": "ID3 tag name A", "ID3tag name B"

.... to be the basis of a lookup query that can be presented to the renderer/media player along with the "hard-coded" ones. You'd need a means to verify tag name validity, so setup may be improved using a GUI with dropdowns for tags....
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