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Can I browse my music by genre then album with iPhone app mconnect or something similar?

halloleo

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I have and UPnP music server (Media Server on my Synology NAS) want to browse (and then listen to the music) with my iPhone. For this I am trying out mconnect Player (lite version so far). mconnect can see (and play) the music from the media server. So far so good.

However browsing through the music seems strangely limited: When I choose Browse -> By Genre -> Chamber Music I expect to see all the albums in this genre (from which I then would select one), but instead I get all songs in this genre. This feels kind of useless to me.

Can I somehow browse my music by genre then album with mconnect? Do I maybe need the full version for this?

Or is another browse-and-play app better for this use case?
 
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freemansteve

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It's likely the DLNA server you are using.
They seem to vary in how they choose to present "virtual folders".

I have just tried VLC on Android to view the DLNA content on my RAID/NAS unit via its built-in server, and then compared with Universal Media Server running on my PC, and the "virtual folders" are different. I get loads in the first setup, including genre/album, genre/song etc, but different one in UMS. It may of course be configurable.

Note that some servers are fussy about tags in files, in that you have various versions of tags and field names. Always worth checking your FLACS and MP3s with the excellent MP3tag.
 

Vincent Kars

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but instead I get all songs in this genre.
Not uncommon. Over the years I have seen a lot of media players (not UPnP enabled) having this silly behavior.
Probably a matter of trying various apps.
 

threni

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Not uncommon. Over the years I have seen a lot of media players (not UPnP enabled) having this silly behavior.
Probably a matter of trying various apps.
I guess it might be because there are songs which are the smallest unit in the database and each song can have a genre (plus a year, an artist etc) tag, whereas an album doesn't exist per se; rather, it's a tag in each song. So "an album" is actually "all the songs which have the same name in the album field". You could create some "virtual" album entities (or do some search on the fly) and assume that each album consists of songs which are all the same genre (but what if they're not?) and list those. Doing this over a network...when do you check if the tags have changed? Where do you store the virtual entities? Do you have to copy the whole database of tags over the network and do it locally? Is that slow? Even possible? Same goes for year - some UIs don't show the year next to the album - which track do you want to see the year of?
 

Vincent Kars

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Most of the time there is nothing you can do about it as a user.
The developer makes a choice.

One of the reasons I like Musicbee is that a lot of these aspects are options instead of fixed values.
You can define what combination of tags defines an Album
You can specify if a Search should return tracks or entire albums,
etc.
 

blackmetalboon

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I use mconnectHD on my iPad, searching by Genre brings up a list of artists tagged under that genre. If you select an artist it then gives you their albums tagged in that genre.

mconnectHD isn’t available on my phone so I can’t be sure if mconnect Player for phones will do the same.
 
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freemansteve

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Not uncommon. Over the years I have seen a lot of media players (not UPnP enabled) having this silly behavior.

If the media players are not UPnP enabled, they won't be much use for the OP, as per his 1st post, when accessing his DLNA server!

Clearly, you can browse files and play them over a network without DLNA with most media players (albeit network file access on IoS is somewhat obfuscated), but the nice thing about a media player that can act as a DLNA renderer is there is no need to store the file & tag database on the phone - it can get large, and still needs to able to access the remote file. A DLNA server does keep things simple, but as said before, they vary in terms of how they "virtualize" based on the tags.
 

Vincent Kars

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If the media players are not UPnP enabled, they won't be much use for the OP, as per his 1st post, when accessing his DLNA server!
Obvious.
Also very obvious is that this behavior is not necessarily UPnP related.
 
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freemansteve

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I can only guess if everything is "obvious", then the OP would have no need to ask questions!
 
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halloleo

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It's likely the DLNA server you are using.
They seem to vary in how they choose to present "virtual folders".

I have just tried VLC on Android to view the DLNA content on my RAID/NAS unit via its built-in server, and then compared with Universal Media Server running on my PC, and the "virtual folders" are different. I get loads in the first setup, including genre/album, genre/song etc, but different one in UMS. It may of course be configurable.

Note that some servers are fussy about tags in files, in that you have various versions of tags and field names. Always worth checking your FLACS and MP3s with the excellent MP3tag.
Super interesting! So it might be the server, not the iOS app, right? I will try other servers (e.g. Minim) and see whther they work better with mconnect.
 
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halloleo

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If the media players are not UPnP enabled, they won't be much use for the OP, as per his 1st post, when accessing his DLNA server!

Clearly, you can browse files and play them over a network without DLNA with most media players (albeit network file access on IoS is somewhat obfuscated), but the nice thing about a media player that can act as a DLNA renderer is there is no need to store the file & tag database on the phone - it can get large, and still needs to able to access the remote file. A DLNA server does keep things simple, but as said before, they vary in terms of how they "virtualize" based on the tags.
What does it mean to have a DLNA renderer? My issue is about browsing, not playing…
 
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halloleo

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I use mconnectHD on my iPad, searching by Genre brings up a list of artists tagged under that genre. If you select an artist it then gives you their albums tagged in that genre.

mconnectHD isn’t available on my phone so I can’t be sure if mconnect Player for phones will do the same.
I sent a message to the makers of mconnect - let’s hope they reply with something useful.
 
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halloleo

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It's likely the DLNA server you are using.
They seem to vary in how they choose to present "virtual folders".

I have just tried VLC on Android to view the DLNA content on my RAID/NAS unit via its built-in server, and then compared with Universal Media Server running on my PC, and the "virtual folders" are different. I get loads in the first setup, including genre/album, genre/song etc, but different one in UMS. It may of course be configurable.

Note that some servers are fussy about tags in files, in that you have various versions of tags and field names. Always worth checking your FLACS and MP3s with the excellent MP3tag.
Follow-up: I got MinimServer configured properly. (Firewall issue - a helpful soul from the MinimServer forum guided me through this.) - Now it works: After selecting -> By Genre -> Chamber Music I then can choose -> Albums and then I see all albums in the Chamber Music genre. Wonderful!!

@ freemansteve thanks for sending me on the right path!
 

HarmonicTHD

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Works for me. I am with the previous posters. It is a matter how the media server is setup and the content is indexed. I use Synology Media Server and indexing enabled - nothing fancy.

Edit. Oops just saw you solved it. Discard then.
 

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freemansteve

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hat does it mean to have a DLNA renderer? My issue is about browsing, not playing…

The naming conventions are clumsy, but in the DLNA world, the 'renderer' is the bit that accesses the files and uses system drivers to access a DAC and send audio data to it, or to a GPU for videos or photos, while a 'controller' is the thing that can find the 'virtual folders' that are created by the server (it's just a database) and let you queue up music or vids for the 'renderer to work through. Some apps or PC programs combine 'control' and 'render' functions in one place, like VLC or Foobar2000. But while these kind of apps are also called 'media players', it doesn't follow that all media players are DLNA capable.

An example where DLNA control, render and server are separate entities would be my CA Evo 75, where the controller function is the StreamMagic app on my Android tablet, but the renderer is the 'gStreamer' code running under Linux, deep in the Evo's CPU board and server on my NAS/RAID device.
 
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freemansteve

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At risk of being repetitive this is an excellent tool to remove all your old id3v1 tags (assuming you have correctly set up tag read/write/remove options in mp3Tag and use id3v2.3 or newer, but be careful!). It is not the OPs problem but it can help avoid seeing confusing tags in some players.

 
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