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forwardt
02-14-2013, 09:06 PM
Mezzmo is head and shoulders above anything else I've seen on the market for music. There is, however one problem for using it as a classical music DLNA server.

Remember that when you are navigating a DLNA server, the views you get are absolutely and only the views being offered by the server. The client is entirely passive.


There are two problems:

1. The views server by Mezzmo allow navigation by Album, Artist etc, but not by Composer. The first are fine for most kinds of music, but you absolutely have to have navigation by Composer for Classical Music, and even for Jazz. This is so, even though the music (whether FLAC or MP3 files in my case) has Composer tags included.

By comparison Twonky Server (which is poorer in nearly every other respect) gives a Composer view. And of course, locally indexing media players such as Windows Media Player and Winamp give a Composer view as well. And you get the same thing with Sonos, and even with the cheap apps (e.g. Flacplayer) for music stored on iPhone and Android.

2. The second problem is that after navigating the top level (e.g. Artist), you get a complete listing of all artists. If you have a music collection of any large size this is difficult to navigate. The method offered elsewhere is an alphabet index (A, B, C ...). When you select a letter, you are then given a view of all items starting with that letter.

Love the product, but it simply isn't useful for classical or jazz collections at this stage.

Hope this can be fixed!

Paul
02-15-2013, 11:28 AM
Hi forwardt,

Some answers:

1. Your Mezzmo library is totally customizable so you can create your own playlists for Composer. A quick guide to get you started: Click on "Music" in the tree in Mezzmo and then click "Create Playlist" -> "Active Playlist". In the "Active Playlist Properties" dialog, give your playlist a name (e.g. "Composer"). Then click the "Add" button and select "Creator". Next, select the "Music files" radio button to restrict the playlist to just music. Click OK and you will see a new "Composer" playlist added under "Music" and it will list all your composers. You can edit this playlist (or any other playlist in the tree) to change the way it works (e.g. add more attributes). Simply right-click on your playlist in the tree and click Properties.

2. The current version of Mezzmo (v3.0.1.0) does not yet automatically create a "rolodex"-style A..Z playlist, but we will be adding this into an upcoming version. For now, users create their own "rolodex"-style playlists - see this FAQ for details - http://forum.conceiva.com/showthread.php/476-Tutorial-How-to-create-a-rolodex-style-index-using-Smart-playlists-in-Mezzmo

forwardt
03-19-2013, 08:51 PM
Paul,

thanks for those tips. The Active Playlist creation feature is terrific, and definitely puts your product ahead of the others.

Unfortunately the second tip to create a smart playlist defined by alphabatical character against composer works, but simply gives an undifferentiated list of "tracks" against that composer.

The concept of track doesn't work for classical or jazz music, since you want to listen to works or albums against a composer list. You don't for example, want to listen to all the first movements of all the Beethoven symphonies in one session, and you don't want to listen to random movements and pieces written by Beethoven.

You would want to listen to the correctly ordered movements of Beethoven's Symphony No 5 on the Album "Beethoven's Symphonies" played by the Halle Orchestra. This is not possible with the workaround.

But I don't think it works very well for modern, popular music anyway. If I want to sort all of the Albums where the album artist starts with B, and I select the Beatles, I want to listen to Abbey Road or Revolver, not a random list of tracks from all their albums. And it's not really random, since it also has a sort order.

It's a nice innovation, and those smart playlists could be powerful, but the objects they sort need to be definable.


Regards,
Tony

Paul
03-19-2013, 11:36 PM
Hi Tony,

Thanks for you feedback. We're just finishing us Mezzmo v3.1 and it will have some nice sorting enhancements. I think you should be able to list and play your albums as you wish. We're planning to release Mezzmo v3.1 in the next week.

forwardt
03-20-2013, 01:48 PM
Paul,

Thanks. Sounds like you've been busy.

Looking forward to the release, and I'll certainly try out the new features.


Regards,
tony

Paul
03-28-2013, 06:08 PM
Mezzmo v3.1 has been released and two of the new features are random shuffling on playlists and folders and 'Group By First Letter' to create 'Rolodex'-style playlists to breakdown long lists of files. See full changelog at http://www.conceiva.com/products/mezzmo/whatsnew.asp