Twonky sorts tracks by track name tag not filename or track number in folder view

[N8Nagel]

Subject says all… just got a My Cloud EX2 for my girlfriend, loaded a bunch of FLACs on it, and…  this.  Albums are unplayable in folder view as the tracks play in alphabetical order by track name, NOT filename or track number (either one of which would work as all our rip files are named with a leading two digit track number then track name)

I found this

http://community.wd.com/t5/My-Book-Live/Twonky-sorting-music-in-quot-folder-quot-mode-still/td-p/482774

but not sure if this applies to My Cloud EX2.  Does it?  I’m not really a computer guy so I don’t want to brick this by following a “recipe” for a completely different product.

Or is there any way to install a different DLNA server onto the EX2 like Serviio?

[Hamlet]

Hello and welcome to the community,

I have never tried installing another DNLA server since is it not supported. Lets see if any other user has tried it and can share some experience on this topic.

[N8Nagel]

Just bumping this back up to the top…  got lots of music loaded on this thing but would really like to be able to sort correctly when navigating in folder view as “artist/album” doesn’t correctly handle “various artists” albums…

Additionally, her roommate noticed that it does the same odd sort when you search by “artist” it just lists all the tracks by that artist alphabetically, but that seems like sort of a useless search anyway (to me, anyhow, as a very album centric listener.)

[cpt_paranoia]

Are you sure it’s Twonky that is causing the problem?

I’ve been looking at DLNA/UPnP apps on Android, IOS and windows recently, looking for a good DMC/DMP app, and I note that each of them have their own way of displaying track order. Even within a single app (Linn’s Kinsky DMC, for instance), the track order is different for each of the different DLNA database views; view ‘By Folder’, for instance, using the file name, whereas ‘Artist/Album’ sorts by track ID.

And this is my experience with a number of media players I’ve used over the years. My music library is created using MediaMonkey, and my initial modus operandi was to insist that filenames were exactly the track name, with no track number. Then I learnt about metadata labelling and sorting, and realised it was better to add a track number prefix to filenames. And later, I decided that the track number should be two-digit, leading-zero format. In this way, even simple directory sorts were pretty sure to list in correct track order. So that’s how my library is arranged. Fortunately, MediaMonkey can automatically re-name files to use this naming structure. It might be worth looking at your filenames, and doing something like this.

[N8Nagel]

Hi cpt_paranoia, and thanks for the reply.  Yes, I’m certain that it is Twonky that is not behaving as I’d expect it to as a) I’m using several different playback devices and they all behave similarly (mostly a Denon AVR-3310ci and a Sony blu-ray player, although I have tried other devices as well that have the capability of streaming across a network from a DLNA server) and b) I installed Serviio on my laptop to try and that seems to operate as I’d expect.

My file names are labeled as you describe, actually - e,g. the first track on Cream’s 1967 album would be as follows

C:\Users\N8N\My Music\Cream\1967 - Disraeli Gears\01 Strange Brew.flac

(or appropriate path for the WD unit, but you get the idea)

Most of this music is ripped off of old CDs using EAC which I have set up to follow this format automatically so 90 plus percent of my files are consistent in this respect, and because I’ve tried to do a really good job of following a rigid logical folder structure it is easiest for me to navigate through my collection using folder view.

However, when I navigate using “by folder” Twonky does not serve up a list of tracks in order of either filename or track number as you’d expect - and either option would work as you can see using my naming convention as above - but rather alphabetically by track name tag, which does not have the leading two digit track number.  So for the album above it would actually play 

05 Blue Condition.flac

04 Dance The Night Away.flac

11 Mother’s Lament.flac

etc. etc. etc.

BTW you are correct re: two digit leading track numbers…  that seems to work on most everything EXCEPT Ford Sync using USB.  I don’t have that car anymore (was an old company car) I can’t remember if it was the track number tag or the filename but I distinctly remember needing to use three digits to make that work correctly.  (while most of my library is FLAC, I do a batch convert every now and then to a decent quality .mp3 so I can load my music or a portion thereof onto a thumb drive for listening in the car… but I’m getting off topic to my initial question.)

[cpt_paranoia]

I think we’re kindred spirits… I’ve ripped a load of old CDs with EAC (I have no downloaded music at all…), into a very rigorously controlled file hierarchy, and my natural inclination is also to use ‘By Folder’. But, sadly, it doesn’t seem to work. So I’ve had to accept that I’ll have to use ‘Artist/Album’ to select music, even though it does split some compilations into artist contributions. It may be Twonky’s fault, or it may be the way the client apps interpret Twonky’s database, I’m not sure, since I have no other DLNA server to compare it with.

The list of UPnP apps I’ve tried is:

Kinsky
UPnPlayer
MediaMonkey
AirWire
UPnP Monkey
MediaHouse
VidOn player
2Player
BubbleUPnP
AirPin
DroidUPnP

They all seem to behave differently in the order they present files, but I don’t think I’ve found one that presents ‘ByFolder’ in numeric track order.

I thought I’d found the perfect DMC in Kinsky, but, sadly, I can’t get it to play more than one track at a time, whether I use UPnPlayer or XBMC as the renderer. This problem is reported on the Linn forum, but they seem reluctant to fix it; it seems to be a problem introduced at some point in the development, and not corrected, since it works okay with Linn DMRs…

p.s. ‘ByFolder’ sorts in alphabetical order based on the track name (not the filename). So it’s a logical order, just not the order we want it to present… That’s why I think it may not be the fault of Twonky; Twonky simply takes the metadata and compiles it into a database, and I think it’s the clients that choose how to present the content of that database. But, without access to the code, and the database, I can’t be sure of this.

[cpt_paranoia]

Okay, here’s some further playing.

Bubble UPnP will display the metadata for a track. This shows that, regardless of ‘viewing mode’, the track number and track title are correct. In ‘ByFolder’ mode, it sorts by title. In ‘Artist/Album’ mode, it sorts by track#. The metadata fields are title, album, artist, track#, duration, year, genre & stream ID (encoding type, length, URL)

UPnP Monkey allows you to set which field is used to sort, offering title, album, artist & track#.

UPnPlayer sorts by track# in both views.

Kinsky sorts by title in ‘ByFolder’ view, and by track# in ‘Artist/Album’ view.

My conclusion, therefore, is that Twonky is providing the correct metadata for tracks, and it’s down to the DMC/DMP to decide which metadata field is used to display track order. And it looks like UPnP Monkey is the most versatile of the UPnP apps I’ve tried, in this respect, since it allows the user to control the sort order.

[N8Nagel]

I’m assuming that it is in fact the DLNA server not the playback unit that determines the order of tracks shown in the menu, as if I connect the same device (receiver, Blu-Ray player, etc.) to Serviio running on my laptop, it works differently than connecting to Twonky running on the WD NAS.

Dunno if there is a non-warranty-violating solution to this, however.  If there’s not, though, sampler discs, soundtracks, etc. won’t be listenable at all in track order unless I go back and create m3u playlists for each of them.

[cpt_paranoia]

Maybe use Bubble UPnP to look at the metadata on Twonky and Serviio, and see what the different fields look like; it may be that they’re extracting metadata differently? Or it may be that your metadata is incorrect…