Howdy,

I've been evaluating a slew of UPnP servers and Mezzmo is absolutely coming out on top (2 days left on my trial!). Above all else, it's because Mezzmo gives me more control of organizing my music library than any other product I tried (the only ones I refused to even evaluate were those with a subscription or recurring upgrade fee). While I have a few other suggestions, I'm going focus on two biggies here and leave the others for a future post.

The absolutely biggest limitation Mezzmo has for me, right now, is that "Album Artist" is not one of its priority tags. I make heavy use of this tag (as do many others as it's popular with my fellow obsessive organizers on foobar2k and musicbrainz communities). The advantage over Artist is that it handles Sampler, Compilation, and other multi-artist albums in a much more organized manner. This allows individual tracks to have their unique artist or artists, while still allowing a single album to remain grouped under a wider umbrella (often "Various Artists"). You should see what those "99 Songs" compilation albums from Amazon do to ones collection with a Artist/Album hierarchy, it's a MESS! I would like to see Album Artist be an additional option for use pretty much everywhere Artist is currently used, most importantly as a criterion for Active Playlists.

Unfortunately, various tagging apps use two different tags for this same purpose for MP3s. Some use "Album Artist" and some use "Band". The latter is probably more common for this usage. In fact, a lot of tagging apps have "Album Artist" in the GUI but actually write to the "Band" tag. If you google +"Album Artist" +Band, you'll see what I mean.

To complicate things a bit more, since a lot of people tend to use one of the Album Artist tags only for those albums with multiple artists, it would be nice if Mezzmo could, when set to use Album Artist, fallback to Artist when an Album Artist tag is not assigned. This is how I have my library view in foobar2k set up. Actually mine has multiple levels of fail-over. It uses "Band" first, "Album Artist" if "Band" is missing, and "Artist" if both are missing: [$if2($if2(%band%,%album artist%),%artist%)] It all sounds complicated but it actually pans out really nicely leaving one with a really nicely organized library.

Second on my obsessive organization kick is the ability to attach what I'll call filters to Active Playlists. Essentially, you create an active playlist per normal, but then can attach any number of filters to eliminate any entries in that level or below in that active playlist hierarchy. Let me give an example of how this would be useful. I have a lot of holiday and anime OST music in my collection, but I never want it mixed in with my usual shuffles. So I could create one root active playlist that has a filter of (!genre:anime) && (!genre:holiday). Those filters would propagate down into any sub-active playlists. Then I could have another active playlist with a filter of (genre:holiday) which would then, of course, just have holiday music, etc. It would be useful for people with spoken word or comedy albums in their collection as well, as well as a slew of other uses. The more tags you can filter against, then better, of course. I just use genre as an example because it meets a need I currently have.

I'm curious if these sound like reasonable requests and if they have any chance of being included some day?

Thanks so much,
Greg