Is thwere any official or unofficial way to sort files streamed through Twonky DLNA server by their physical name? My WD Live removes numbers from filenames and then sorts by those remaining string which completly breaks the sort order of all my files in albums. As I understand this is an issue in Twonky server used by WD and it does not look like Twonky or WD are planning to fix it. But is there a way to change its configuration either through config interface or by chnging config files directly to make it sor by track number or at least by physical, non-altered name?
This is an example of what I have and what I see. If it cannot be done I will have to return my WD Live I bought from Best Buy yesterday as it is impossible to listen albums with track in wrong order (try to do it for classical music!):
I have:
-
D
-
A
-
B
WD Live streams them as
A
B
C
Which is completely wrong and makes WD Live DLNA function unuseable…
With both Twonky & my Netgear’s DLNA, I find that the only way I know of to get an album to play the selections as ripped is to go down the high-level “folders” route instead of “albums”, artists or whatever. With folders, I then drill down to the particular album; if I do folders then artists, I get everything by the artist disregarding an album content; would have been nicer if it gave a selection of the album of the artist for selection but then it’s in alpha order.
I think the Twonky & DLNA are pop/rap/rock oriented & expect that the user will use “playlists” instead of albums to play music. I don’t see myself creating a “playlist” of each album. Going down the “folders” route is preferable for me rather than the counter productive “cateloging” by the media servers’ software.
I am doing it through “folder” but the problem is that it still sorts everything inside folder by title tag (verified) and does not even look at track number. I find a solution on how to fix Twonky server view configuration to change sorting by tag + title but I am not sure all of my files have correct track number tag. So it looks like I have to retag everything to make sure track number is there plus change the view configuration manually.
I wish they had a possibility to sort by physical filename but I did not find this option in Twonky server view xml files yet.
What you see may be the DLNA client (?). I notice that what I see on my AVR with Twonky is different when I had an usb3 drive connected to the router which has a DLNA server. Twonky sends much more categories of music than the DLNA.
I use FreeRip to rip my CDs to the hard disk as flac; now doing it to the usb3 Hitachi connected to the computer as my MBL is “dead” as in it now only works as a hard disk.
I see that FreeRip uses the track number as part of the title but not sure but did see stuff in alpha order when using DLNA but looking at the command prompt, the track number is still part of the filename with a dash between the number & name.
The latest FreeRip does have a slight problem in that when changing the album title, one must press the enter key else the change doesn’t propergate to the tracks info. I’ve also had the output as: album title/artist/track num-track title.ext; guess that’s why the track number is part of the filename & plays as the track is sequenced.
Hindsight says just include the track num as part of the outputted file name!
I did it. A couple of pretty simple steps. First, I had to retag all my flacs with this free utility:
http://www.mp3tag.de/en/
I made a custom sort column there by folder + track_name and applied global track numbering. Worked pretty well.
Second, I enabled ssh on my WD My Book Live. Love that it is running full-featured Linux.
Third, added a couple of strings to a view-definitions.xml file: key words are
sortcriteria=‘+upnp:originalTrackNumber,+dc:title’
for container ‘byfolder’ and its subcontainer. Also added albumart=‘1’ there to show album art.
Now my folder view works as expected. While retagging, I added album name tags to missing albums so the view by album will also we OK now.
The lesson here is that all the possible tags should be filled out when ripping the disk. Otherwise there will be several types of issues.
