Backwards compatibility with Custom Browse, Custom Scan and Multi Library?

[dolodobendan]

Hi darrell-k, I wonder if updating to LMS 9.x will break "my" implementation of a classical music library (LMS 8.5.x). For instance, I already use the "WORK" tag in my menu structure:

Classical

/ GENRE / COMPOSER / WORK / RECORDING
/ COMPOSER / WORK / RECORDING
/ OCCASION / COMPOSER / WORK / RECORDING

Your new implementation sounds very promising, but (from what I understand) cannot distinguish between different recordings. For example, I do have eight recordings of Rossini's Il barbiere di Siviglia (WORK = Il barbiere di Siviglia) and they differ only in the RECORDING tag, which contains the year and whatever is useful here, be it the conductor or the orchestra with the date.

Most people maybe do not have more than one recording of a composer's work, of course. But some do. ;-)

If your implementation can do that or will be able to do what I did the old fashioned way, I would gladly switch! Otherwise I'll have to stick to 8.x (if this proves to be an incompatible change) and hope that nothing breaks. ;-)

Thank you for helping to keep LMS alive and kicking!

[darrell-k]

We do support what you describe (I have many versions of lots of works).

If the different performances are all on different albums, you don't need to do anything more than tag WORK and COMPOSER, LMS will show each album containing the work, under the main Work level.

If you have multiple performances of a work on the same album, then create a PERFORMANCE tag containing whatever description of the performance you like. You can of course do this even if an album has only one version of a work on it, if you need a better description than the album name alone.

In the case of opera/ballet etc, you can set a GROUPING tag to indicate the Act or Scene. Then, if you use Material Skin, the track listing will show playable subheadings for each "grouping". You can also see these grouping headings in the play queue if you like. Using Default Skin, all you can do is include GROUPING as an element in "Title Formats" (along with WORK and PERFORMANCE, if you want).

You will also find "Works" results in the standard LMS searches, which is a benefit of this full integration of classical functionality.

There is a (work in progress) guide to classical music under LMS here: https://lyrion.org/getting-started/beginners-guide-to-classical-music-on-lms/

There's also the forum: https://forums.slimdevices.com/forum/user-forums/logitech-media-server/1737175-lyrion-music-server-9-0-0-classical-works-functionality-support