New user initial observations

[simonbun]

I'm a long time user of UPnP so OpenSubsonic is all new to me, as such I didn't want to go spraying bugs/requests/queries all over the forum so I'll put everything in here and on request will add the relevant issues to the tracker.

I've configured the Subsonic API transcoding to MP3@192, but Symfonium is reporting 128. I tried Tempo but it's reporting FLAC, so I guess it's not going through the API?

Would it be possible to use a natural sort order for albums? I have quite a few series where the album name is suffixed with the volume and these aren't sorting correctly e.g.
Now Music 10
Now Music 20
Now Music 9

LMS doesn't appear to be indexing all my artist images. I'm only testing with a small quanity of albums, but Symfonium and Tempo are only showing artwork for 3 of the 8 albumartists.
My file layout is:
/%AlbumArtist%/artist.jpg
/%AlbumArtist%/%Album%/%AlbumIndex%/%discnumber%.%tracknumber%.flac

It looks like LMS/OpenSubsonic doesn't support Styles (Allmusic). Would it be possible to use my Style tag to populate Mood?

I use a RELEASE tag to disambiguate albums e.g Deluxe Edition; I believe Roon uses VERSION and Picard has _releasecomment. Whilst the spec may not make any use of this, it would be very useful if this could be concatenated to the album tag for attribution/display purposes.

I'm thinking of some kind of config file that could be used to perform these types of transformations e.g.
ALBUM:ALBUM[" ("RELEASE")"]
MOOD:STYLE

Having read all that you may be wondering why I'm even contemplating LMS, but I've evaluated a number of servers and I'm very impressed with what I've seen.

[epoupon]

Hello!

I've configured the Subsonic API transcoding to MP3@192

You mean in your settings panel in the UI of LMS?
Transcoding is not enabled by default, and even if you set transcoding settings, clients may request format/bitrate that override the values you set in LMS settings (clients have different needs depending the network used). Maybe that's the case here? you can inspect the request urls to check.

Would it be possible to use a natural sort order for albums

You mean in the album view? Albums are sorted using the button on the upper right hand corner. In which situation do you encounter a sort problem?

LMS doesn't appear to be indexing all my artist images

This is unfortunate. I recently (in v3.59.0) changed how parsing is done so there might be some regressions.
artist.jpg is searched in the longest path that all the releases have in common, so it should correctly pick your file. Also the role is important, only albums where the artist is credited as "album artist" are taken into account (an artist can appear on other album artist's work). Will make some tests with your layout to check all this.

It looks like LMS/OpenSubsonic doesn't support Styles (Allmusic). Would it be possible to use my Style tag to populate Mood?

LMS can pick whatever custom tags you want, and display/filter them in its UI, but there is no such mapping to other tags currently.

I use a RELEASE tag to disambiguate albums e.g Deluxe Edition

A similar issue has been raised: #465 This is quite different in your case since I believe release mbids would be different? Actually I guess you want a way to display releases that share the same release group?

Having read all that you may be wondering why I'm even contemplating LMS, but I've evaluated a number of servers and I'm very impressed with what I've seen.

Thanks for your feedback!

[simonbun]

You mean in your settings panel in the UI of LMS?
Transcoding is not enabled by default, and even if you set transcoding settings, the server may request format/bitrate that override the values you set in LMS settings (clients have different needs depending the network used). Maybe that's the case here? you can inspect the request urls to check.

Yes, I have transcoding enabled in the LMS UI and set to MP3@192. If I switch to another codec that change is seen in Symfonium so I assume it's not overriding the defaults, which is good.
If I look at the Details of a track in Symfonium I see the correct file path (*.flac) but the Bitrate is 128 and Mime type is mp3.

You mean in the album view? Albums are sorted using the button on the upper right hand corner. In which situation do you encounter a sort problem?

Yes in the Albums section with All selected. The actual values are 'Now That's What I Call Music! 9' and 'Now That's What I Call Music! 10'.

artist.jpg is searched in the longest path that all the releases have in common, so it should correctly pick your file. Also the role is important, only albums where the artist is credited as "album artist" are taken into account (an artist can appear on other album artist's work). Will make some tests with your layout to check all this.

Every track under an AlbumArtist path (I actually use AlbumArtistSort in the path, not that I think that can make a difference) will have AlbumArtist set to the same single value, so that should be fine. I couldn't see any logic to those missing, but maybe I'll copy the images that were working over to the other locations just to rule out any file incompatibility (they're all jpg though).

Writing the reply made me think of another test. It looks like if the albumartist only has a single album then the artwork isn't being captured.

LMS can pick whatever custom tags you want, and display/filter them in its UI, but there is no such mapping to other tags currently.

I think I read that only Mood is supported in OpenSubsonic, and I know Symfonium has a placeholder for Mood, so I was hoping that if LMS indexed Mood it would pass it through (I should have tested that first), whereas I know that even if I add Style to LMS as a tag it doesn't get passed through.

A similar issue has been raised: #465 This is quite different in your case since I believe release mbids would be different? Actually I guess you want a way to display releases that share the same release group?

Whilst I do use that approach in my metadata (%album% being release group with %release% the disambiguation) I don't think OpenSubsonic supports it, or any of the clients, so I wasn't expecting that - although that would have been really nice.
To cut a long story short, without the disambiguation all the different versions of an album look the same (original vs remasters vs Deluxe etc), so the "simple" way to fix that would be to concatenate album with version/release/etc during the tag read and leave the rest alone. Another use of such a transformation would be to append subtitle to title.

Thanks for your feedback!

I pushed my test suite of albums through Emby, Jellyfin, Plex, Lyrion, AssetUPnP and Navidrome and LMS came out on top (album attribution and support of disc subtitles), so that's why I'm here!

[epoupon]

I created #538 to track enhancement for artist image resolutions.

I think I read that only Mood is supported in OpenSubsonic, and I know Symfonium has a placeholder for Mood, so I was hoping that if LMS indexed Mood it would pass it through (I should have tested that first), whereas I know that even if I add Style to LMS as a tag it doesn't get passed through.

BTW, mood tags are already supported by LMS and are already exposed using OpenSubsonic API

[simonbun]

I created #538 to track enhancement for artist image resolutions.

For now I'm copying the artist images into a child folder, although I'm having trouble getting Symfonium to display all of them. getArtists looks fine and Tempo displays them so it looks like a bug with Symfonium.

Rather than extend the logic to identify the "artist" folder, wouldn't it be easier if the user chose/created a template, something like:

• /music/%albumartist%/%album%/%tracks%
• /music/%albumartist%/%album%/%folder%/%tracks%
• /music/%albumartist%/%folder%/%album%/%tracks% (my setup)

Where %folder% represents any folder that has no relevance e.g. CD01/Disc 1/A01. If the first part of the path was anchored you could have multiple per library e.g. for those that only use CDXX if the album has more than one disc.
Depending on the logic to group albums (tags or a combination of tags and folders) even %album% may not be needed.

I think I read that only Mood is supported in OpenSubsonic, and I know Symfonium has a placeholder for Mood, so I was hoping that if LMS indexed Mood it would pass it through (I should have tested that first), whereas I know that even if I add Style to LMS as a tag it doesn't get passed through.

BTW, mood tags are already supported by LMS and are already exposed using OpenSubsonic API

This was related to my query about aliasing Mood to Styles so I could push Styles through, as I don't think it's supported.

Thanks again.

[epoupon]

Yes, I have transcoding enabled in the LMS UI and set to MP3@192. If I switch to another codec that change is seen in Symfonium so I assume it's not overriding the defaults, which is good. If I look at the Details of a track in Symfonium I see the correct file path (*.flac) but the Bitrate is 128 and Mime type is mp3.

Hello,
In the Subsonic API, we can just report transcodedContentType (The transcoded mediaType if transcoding should happen) and transcodedSuffix (The file suffix of the transcoded media). There is nothing about bitrates. OpenSubsonic API will likely evolve in the near future to handle all this properly.

[simonbun]

Hello, In the Subsonic API, we can just report transcodedContentType (The transcoded mediaType if transcoding should happen) and transcodedSuffix (The file suffix of the transcoded media). There is nothing about bitrates. OpenSubsonic API will likely evolve in the near future to handle all this properly.

I'm not asking for the client to be able to control the bitrate (although that would be nice), I'm saying that no matter what bitrate I set in the LMS GUI the transcoded stream is always 128 (for MP3).

If I enable 'Enable transcoding by default' in the 'Subsonic API' section of the LMS GUI, my FLAC files are transcoded to MP3 when streamed from LMS to my UPnP renderers via Symfonium. If in Symfonium I enable 'Ignore server transcoding settings' then the files are sent to the renderer unmodified, so everything else seems to be working as designed.

On a different subject, I was wondering if, for an artist without supplied artwork it would be possible to use one of their album covers instead? I'll be moving a family member over to LMS this week, and whilst I'll provide them with an initial set of images, I don't expect them to keep it up, and the missing images in Symfonium is quite jarring.

Keep up the great work!

[epoupon]

In the stream endpoint of the Subsonic API, the client can set maxBitrate to make transcoding happen only if needed. As said, this API is quite complex and limited and is about to be reworked.

For the artist images, indeed I noticed some services do that kind of fallback (+ display images using a circle shape in the grid views). I will give it a try!

[Bigmack3000]

Hey, can i ask how you went about acquiring artist images? I'm trying to find the most efficient way. Thanks.

[simonbun]

To get good initial coverage I had Plex index my collection and used Tautulli to export them. From memory the output was one artist per folder, so you'll likely need a script to copy them to your collection.
I think the majority of the images were 1000x1000 so you might want to use something like ImageMagick to batch resize them.