Here are Twonky 5/6 trees to suit larger music collections

[Briain]

Latest note

Update 22nd Dec 2011 (four new tree packs) The top four tree packs are my latest ones; there are two choices for folks with large collections and two choices for folks with smaller collections. Full instructions (and pictures) of how to install them with the Qnap Twonky QPKG can be found here.

Previous notes

Update 26th July 2011 (toggle art off at head of folder container) As the summary implies, I've changed these to prevent them showing art at the heads of the folder containers (this is in line with how Twonky do it). The previous trees (which show art in the folder containers) have also been put back here (they're the first two in the list)

Update 24th April 2011 (trees improved) Added back some of the basic Twonky containers and given all my custom ones bespoke links (groupid). This will enable compatibility with control points which don't rely on trees, whilst maintaining the custom menus of the previous trees. In addition, it has also boosted performance (see red note at the bottom of this post). I'll also post ungrouped versions when I get some time to build/test them.

Update 20th Dec 2010 (Twonky 6.0.30 QPKG) Note that the trees for this new version are now located within the QPKG directory; see here for detailed instructions on how to change them.

Latest versions of custom Twonky 5.1 and 6.0 music trees:

These are my latest alternative Twonky music trees better suited to folks with large album collections. There are two packs available (another two, better suited to smaller music collections, will follow when I get time to write them). The below picture shows the main menu for both packs (combined onto one image). The images in the rest of this post show navigation examples where you start at the left and work to the right (each column is the result of the selection in the column to its left; Paint Shop Pro is very handy)

TwoNewTrees.jpg

The main top level containers have both a '-List All-' container (shown selected below) and also alpha-grouped containers (the A~Z ones below the '-List All-' container). This is very useful for reducing list size and to quickly navigating when you know exactly what you are looking for (so for the album 'Zuma' you can select 'Z', to list all the albums beginning with 'Z' and thus to save you scrolling all the way to down to the Z's in the 'Browse All' container). It also speeds up the operation when dealing with 'less powerful' control points (like old '0.0000001 horse-power' HP iPaq PDA devices etc).

Main_Menu.jpg

Note that the two images show a collage of menus starting from the left. Each column represents what you'd get by selecting the green highlighted area in the previous column. On a control point (like an iPad running Chorus or Songbook) each column represents what you' see on a single screen (the next column showing the next screen). I hope that makes sense to you - it confuses the 'underworld' out of me - but the easiest way to see what I mean is just to try one of the trees; I promise that it all makes total sense (even at wild parties) when you actually see them in action!

The below shows one of the more complex - and actually very useful - navigation routes (genre/composer/album). Other containers contain less steps to get to the music (like albums - as shown above - and artists etc) and some of these are shown in previous posts (previous page).

Image2.jpg

In addition to the ones on the previous page, I’ve now put the sortcriteria='+pv:numberOfThisDisc,+upnp:originalTrackNumber' term back in every container that ends in an album. I’ve even put it into folder view such that a double album in a single folder now groups all the disk 1 tracks together first (then disk 2 tracks etc) and thus doesn’t now jumble them up as 1, 1, 2, 2, etc.

The below picture shows the custom 'Twonky Folder' view on the left and the actual Windows folder view on the right; the left is sorted as disk one, track 1-13 then disk 2, tracks 1-13 (as they are on the album). This sort order is maintained whenever there is an album option anywhere within the menu structure (there are a lot of them)

FolderViewSort.jpg

Note that it doesn’t show as two separate covers (under ‘Albums’) on the CP (like SqueezeCentre does) but only as a single album; however, it does now group the tracks correctly even if there are two track 1’s, two track 2’s etc, so it’s really handy for those ones that accidentally slip through – with the same name for each disk – during

Which tree pack to choose:


Medium to Large Music Collections (alpha-grouped trees):

Folks with large music collections and who do use the albumartist tags, use 2012_AlbumArtist.zip

Folks with large music collections but who do not use the album artist tags, use 2012_ArtistOnly.zip

Small Music Collections (ungrouped trees):

Folks with small music collections and who do use the albumartist tags, use 2012_Ungrouped_AlbumArtist.zip

Folks with small music collections but who do not use the album artist tags, use 2012_Ungrouped_ArtistOnly.zip

Full instructions (and pictures) of how to install them with the Qnap Twonky QPKG can be found here on the Linn forum.

There are iPad screen shots of the main menu for albumartist tree as viewed on Songbook DS and Chorus DS control points; see here.

Bri

For folks who wish to show art at the head of the folder containers, please continue to use the older versions at the bottom of the below list. If there is demand for this feature in the newer trees, I'll adapt them soon and post them as alternative versions.

[hugoread]

One thing I've been toying with is changing the Album title to describe the work - classical music only.
Typically you have a single artist/group performing works by different composers on a CD. When I want to look for something, it's usually a specific work by a composer. So breaking that CD into several Albums, with each Title being a movement or part of that set seems like a good idea.

Hi Sean, I have loads of Classical Music and this is exactly what I do; it's the only way to go! For example, I have all 9 Beethoven CDs on various CDs, but the 'albums' I have tagged are 'Beethoven 1', 'Beethoven 2' etc. The tracks within the albums are then obviously the movements. For me the fact that there were two symphonies on one CD is irrelevant, that is just packaging to suit the length of a CD - it makes much more sense to consider the work to be the album. I also use Album Artist for a lot of classical albums, which may or may not have differing underlying artists. I do all my ripping and tagging in J River Media Jukebox, which has very powerful smart tagging capabilities and also allows you to set up as many custom views of your music as you like.

[hugoread]

Hi Brian,

Your trees seem to be just what I need. I use a very cheap app for my iPod Touch called PlugPlayer to stream my music to my hi-fi. It's fantastic, I just pick the music server, which is Twonky from my NAS, and pick the renderer, which is the iPod itself (you could use it just as a controller and use something else as the renderer) and that's it. The app then browses the twonky trees and plays the music through my hi-fi. I don't actually have any music stored on the iPod!

Anyway, I use Album Artist a lot and totally agree with you that it's the way to go. Particularly for classical music I often have different contributing artists to an album but only one overall Album Artist. I then also have plenty of 'Various' album artists for compilations with the artists all filled in appropriately. Unfortunately without your trees all the underlying artists show up and it's a nightmare, so I need them! I realise I can use the 'Compilation' folder that twonky looks for (should that be created directly under your music folder, or directly in the Qmultimedia folder?), but I really don't want to move all the albums that have different underlying artists to a compilation folder, so I'd like to get your trees working instead.

Here's my problem... how do I upload them onto the NAS?! Sorry if it's a thick question or if it's been answered before. I have searched but I can't find the answer. I've got your trees, but I don't know what to do with them! I'm also hoping that they might be persistent on a reboot, as I have a 219P as does someone on this thread who previously commented that the trees were persistent for them on reboot.

Thanks in advance,
Hugo.

[Briain]

Hi

To answer both above posts:

Hi Hugo and Cloudyweather

I now have three music directories (Artist, Comps, Classical). My classical albums are all filed in composer named directories, and though I use the composer tag for most single composer albums, but for multi-composer, I have them filed in a 'Various' folder. As the latest trees sort by track (and disk) number, the folder view can be used for selecting classical albums which have multiple composer tags.

Directories.jpg

Though I don't often need this for my own control points (I just use genre/composer/album in my tree) it is still occasionally very useful for selecting one of my multi composer tagged albums. It also works particularly well with SlimServer (which doesn't have composer/album navigation) and also works well with a Sonos.

Hi Hugo

I too use an iPad purely as a control point (I use Chorus DS and Songbook) as well as using Kinsky PDA on an HP iPaq 614. These are used to control a Linn KDS in my main room and a Linn Majik MDS-I in my TV room.

As with all NAS's, you have to use SSH (if you are using Windows, download PuTTY; it's free) to upload the trees from somewhere on the NAS (say the 'Public' share) to the 'Linux' part of the NAS you cannot see. There are graphical tools that permit you to drag and drop them using Windows (they use SSH in the background) but I haven't used them myself (I'm told they're pretty good though). The more basic method is to use PuTTY and I've shown a screen shot of me moving the trees from a folder called 'Trees' on my Public share and into the correct /resources/views directory in the NAS. I've also copied over my modified transcoding file which enables Twonky 5.1 to send art at full resolution (to the control point). That file lives one level up (in /resources).

Unfortunately, where the Qnap is a pest is that every reboot replaces them all with the Twonky originals and I've not yet thought of an easy way to resolve that (I leave my NAS on all the time so it's not really a problem for me).

Bri

[booyip]

Briain - been looking at your very tidy screenshots & organised collection and after a little advice. My MP3/Music collection is also quite large (2,000+ albums) though all very messy in comparison. At the moment I have most music in folders based on artist name (a-c, d-f, etc), plus a "dump" folder for new music, and a compilations folder. Not got much classical so no separation required there, though I have lots of podcasts, radio shows and audio books which make a right mess of current Artist and Album views in Twonky. Which software would you recommend to assist with the arduous task of tag editing? I'm not concerned about Genre tags, though Year/Decade of release would be good, but really just album name and artist name would be a massive step forward. I have Win7 or OSX or Linux OS' available.

Ideally, here's what I'd like to achieve...

- Twonky Setup on my TS-409 with extended trees similar to your setup.
- iTunes integration, though this is a nice-t--have (not a fan of iTunes, but the wife uses it on her Mac)
- Method of editing tags for new stuff downloaded onto the QNAP Qdownload folder - or will this require moving to PC/Mac first, then re-uploading?
- XBOX 360 / Allshare (Samsung) DLNA integration with TS-409 if possible (again artist / album would be great, plus a workable folder view for a-c, d-f, etc). I saw you mentioned some limitations, but would be great for me if I could get a workable solution.

Apologies if this is rather vague request but I am not asking for complete solution, just a pointer in the right direction, or some good reading resources. If I am going to be manually editing tags on all albums I want to get it right first time.

Thanks in advance and apologies this request is not so focused on Twonky/QNAP tech, and more on my big messy folders!

[hugoread]

Hi Brian,

thanks for your response to my question on how to get your trees up on my QNAP 219P. I downloaded PuTTY, downloaded your trees and put them in the Public/trees folder on the QNAP (just like you) and followed the terminal commands on your screen shot, which successfully overwrote the trees, exactly as per your screen shot, doing a 'y' to confirm the overwrite for each file in turn. Easy. I didn't overwrite the transcoding.db file, as it seems that was optional to replace this and I don't know what it is, so I was nervous of replacing it. My album covers only show on my iPod, so Twonky resizing to 160 pixels is fine by me. I really just wanted to get the trees working.

Anyway, after doing a 'Rebuild Database' (as per the instructions), the Twonky maintenance webpage just hung so I had to close it eventually. Then trying to go back to the main twonky interface from the QNAP interface (ie the :9000 webpage), my browser gave me a 'file not found' - ie twonky had crashed! I tried to connect to it from my iPod using the PlugPlayer app (my usual controller) but it was no longer available, so it was definitely down. I waited 24 hours, until today, in case the rebuild was insanely slow, but it hadn't come back. So I rebooted the NAS and phew, it's come back, but of course the new trees are lost!! Ahh! Oh I wish I could those album artist trees working! Any thoughts on why replacing the trees might have crashed Twonky? I've got version 5.1.6 on my QNAP 219P, which is running the latest firmware.

Alternatively, as I do like to be able to reboot the NAS most nights or certainly once a week and I don't want to have to copy the trees each time, I could use the 'compilation directories' in the townky interface. Do you know if I have to put the whole path there for each folder that has compilations? This won't help me for a nice composer tree though, but I might have to settle for that for now though it's really unsatisfactory.

Incidentally, my music is as follows:

- about 2000 albums, all very carefully and completely tagged, using 'album artist' and 'composer' where appropriate and nearly always using 'date' too.
- about 100 albums where the album artist isn't the same as all the underlying artists
- about a third classical, a third jazz and third everything else
- all the classical is what I would consider correctly tagged. ie the artist is NOT the composer, it's the person playing the piece!
- I have several classical genres, not just 'classical' (eg: classical guitar, opera, classical, lieder, early music ... )
- for certain composers (Bach best example perhaps) I have loads of albums, getting on for hundred, and I absolutely need to browse via the album artist after the composer (ie composer/album artist/album). Going straight to a list of albums from the composer is not refined enough for me.

Bearing that in mind, the only four routes I need to navigate through my music are:

genre -> album artist -> album (eg: "Folk-Rolk" -> "Dylan, Bob" -> "Highway 61 Revisited"
genre -> album artist -> album by year (eg: "Folk-Rolk" -> "Dylan, Bob" -> "1965 - Highway 61 Revisited")
composer -> (genre ->) album artist ->album (eg: "Bach, JS" -> "Pinnock, Trevor" -> "Brandenburg Concertos 1-3"
composer -> (genre ->) album artist ->album by year (eg: "Bach, JS" -> "Pinnock, Trevor" -> "2009 - Brandenburg Concertos 1-3"

I'm pretty sure all those routes are supported by your trees, is that right? I reckon the best way to navigate the above routes would be with just two trees, one starting with genre and one starting with composer. Then for both trees when you got to the last choice, you could choose either 'album' or 'album by year'. For the second tree I would only ever use to look for classical music, so I probably would always go for 'all' genres at the second step, but I don't mind having to do this, as I could then if I wanted go to 'Bach, JS' and then go to either 'Choral' or 'Classical' or 'all' genres, before going on to 'Pinnock, Trevor', if you see what I mean!

Thanks very much for your help,
Hugo.

[Briain]

Hi

Yes, I have a similar sized collection but with a lot more compilations as well. Your proposed navigation routes do exist in my tree. Actually, the ones I use most for classical are genre/composer/album and genre/composer/albumartist. I have renamed all classical composers to have the surname first but the many hundreds of composers associated with other genres are as they were when the album tags were populated from freedb etc. The genre/composer route is handy in that you can use the classical genre to filter out everything but the classical composers and thus make it a lot easier to find things. In addition, I also use several genres for certain albums. Twonky don't use the standard multiple tag format, but instead use commas to separate genre entries. It's a shame they don't use the standard format, but it is extremely useful none the less. An example would be as follows: Classical - Harpsichord,Classical,ECM (note that there are no spaces between the words). This would mean the album appears in all these three categories including the general 'Classical' one; it's very useful.

I haven't 'masked' my compilations with any of the more current Twonky versions and thus cannot say whether it works well or not (it was broken in 5.0.65 but I think they fixed it for 5.1.x versions), but from memory, you could either name the directories as shown in the Twonky configuration, or indeed set an absolute path (that's how I had it foe Twonky 4 a few years ago); you would have to experiment to see which one (if not both) still work in Twonky 5.1.x. I have all my compilations in a separate directory, so that would be easy to do (if I wanted to), but I prefer to use the album artist tag 'instead' of the artist when selecting music, but have the artist index showing all the contributing artists. This means I can find any artist on the NAS whereas 'masking' the compilations would mean you can't find them. My guess is that any directory called Compilations will have the artists ignored but you could easily test this by temporarily renaming a couple of them and performing a database rebuild to see if the artists disappeared.

I am very surprised that the trees didn't work as I've tested them on a PC (Intel/Windows), a Qnap TS-659 (Intel/Linux) and a ReadyNAS (Sparc/Linux) and I know someone who has tested them on a Mac. My best guess is that Twonky was maybe trying to rescan the music library whilst you were actually changing the trees and thus corrupted the Twonky database (that would certainly break it). One thing you could do is to set the rescan to 0 then try again. If that doesn't work, stop Twonky (via the Qnap web interface), then replace the trees, then start it again (via the Qnap interface) and rebuild the database. As you say, no harm can be done as simply restarting the NAS will put it all back to normal.

As soon as we either get Twonky 5 as a QPKG (assuming T6 is bundled in the firmware) then you can over-write the trees once and that will be the job done. If Qnap release Twonky 6 as a QPKG, that would be even better as that would mean you can use T6 with the custom trees and that they will not be replaced by a re-boot.

Bri

PS You are correct about the image resizing file; it is not necessary to change the that as part of changing the trees.

[hugoread]

Thanks for your really helpful reply Brian, you are truly a top bloke. It sounds like we have fairly similar music setups, but I haven't used the multiple genre idea; I might give that a go at some point! But first, I must sort out the trees for 'Album Artist' and 'Composer' to sort out my classical music and compilations problem.

I'll try disabling Twonky from the QNAP interface, uploading the trees, restarting Twonky and doing a database rebuild, as you suggested. I'll post again after I've done it to let you know how I got on.

Hugo.

[hugoread]

Hello again Brian,

Well, a bit more info... if you disable Twonky from the QNAP interface and restart it, then it replaces the default trees! So that didn't work. Instead I set the rescan to '0' as you suggested and made sure no scanning was taking place when I copied the trees. Unfortunately the same thing happened; when I hit the 'rebuild database' button, it crashed Twonky just like the last time. The only thing I could then do was stop and start twonky from the QNAP interface, which started Twonky again OK but replaced the trees to default again!

Any ideas? I've got a TS-219P and don't have any problems with the box. I'm definitely using PuTTY exactly as per your screen shot and I'm having to confirm the file replace for each file, so the trees are definitely getting written to the correct spot.

Cheers,
Hugo.

[Briain]

Hi

No, I can't think why that would happen; it really is most bizzare! The trees are more complex and thus the database will take longer to build, but the resources are not an issue as I have used very similar trees on a ReadyNAS Duo (which has a much 'slower' CPU than your NAS) and with a large collection.

Let me post (in a few minutes) the correct Twonky 5.1 trees (as these are slightly different; they're for Twonky 6). It makes no difference to my Twonky 5 tests, but it's worth a try in case the Mavell Kirkwood version of Twonky is more tree-fussy for some odd reason.

Now is the time to test it because the reboot gives you a very easy way to restore it to normality

Bri

[Briain]

Hi

Files removed; updated trees in above posts

Attached are my actual trees that Super-Poussin (from the Netgear forum) bundled with the Linn DS users version of Twonky 5.1.5. These are simpler than the ones posted above and are known to be good on the slower ReadyNAS. I doubt it'll make much difference, but there are a few key changes (resulting in more Twonky database complexity) that were added after the ones I've attached here.

If these do work, we can then add some of the things back and see which term/feature is upsetting Twonky on the 219. Again, this is most unexpected as I've not seen (nor heard) of anyone else having any problems with them (being used with Twonky 5.1) so it would be good to find out what's happening.

Bri

NB Is your Qnap set to monitor 'Music Only' for the music share?

[hugoread]

Hello again,

Well, the plot thickens. The v5 trees uploaded fine and the database rebuild worked without crashing Twonky. However, after the system finished rescanning the files, when I opened the Twonky Media Browser, the trees were the same old default ones! I didn't restart Townky or the NAS or anything that should have caused them to be replaced (according to this thread), but it would seem that something did indeed cause them to be replaced! Not sure what to try next really.

On your other question, here are the watched folders I have...

hugo-twonky-folders.jpg

I'd like to remove the top one (the overall Qmultimedia folder) and only have the sub-folders watching the appropriate media types, but there doesn't seem to be an option to remove the line entry. It's not checked, so it shouldn't matter, but I'd like to remove it from the list.

Anyway, let's hope we can resolve this tree mystery!

Hugo.

[hugoread]

Quick update to my last post; I just tried the v5 trees again and this time they crashed Twonky on the rebuild database, just like the v6 trees. Back to square one!

[hugoread]

I've tried doing it again with only my 'pop' folder being watched, which only contains 1100 tracks. The rebuild works fine, but following the rebuild the trees are exactly the same as the default trees (ie no album artist and just a mess of artists that aren't being obscured). I've definitely copied over the files correctly, so something must be causing them to be re-overwritten with the default trees, even though I'm not re-booting.

Hugo.

[Briain]

That might explain why things are crashing; maybe it's copying the original trees back again whilst it's trying to start building the database? It's most odd as the Intel Qnaps don't behave that way; they only replace the trees when the entire NAS is re-booted. Maybe someone else will be able to chip in and let us know if the 219 behaves that way by default; it doesn't sound very likely, but it could explain why it's crashing, too.

Anyhow, if Twonky 6 is released as a QPKG then that will be a thing of the past (as we can simply change the trees), and if it isn't released as a QPKG, I believe the plan would then be to make Twonky 5 available as a QPKG, so either way, something should be available soon that we can work on!

Bri

PS I think you have to delete the paths from the bottom up, so to tidy up the paths, you can set the top one to be the same as the bottom one. You could then delete the bottom one and hit the save button. I know the unticked one will not show on the control point, but I don't know if the contents are still scanned, so it would be a good idea to remove that one anyway (if it is scanned, it'll increase the database size and slow the scan down)