Screen flipping on Mosaic

My new Bartok arrived today… still working through the options and setup… it’ll take some time I think.

I have an issue with using the Mosaic app (Android 8.1 tablet).

If I try landscape (my preferred orientation) the Mosaic display keeps on flipping back and forth between portrait and landscape :slight_smile: If I hold the tablet portrait then the app stays portrait. If I orientate the tablet landscape the app keeps on flipping between the two :frowning:
If I go into the display settings on the tablet and fix it to landscape it still flips back and forth all the time but now no matter what way I have the tablet. In fact if I force it to landscape in the tablet settings it’s a nightmare to stop the app flipping all the time no matter what orientation the tablet is. I have to reboot the tablet to stop it!

btw other apps orientate fine with no issues… it’s only Mosaic that seems to be playing up.

Help!

Which Android tablet do you have?

Also, please reply back with what Mosaic Control is reporting as the “Detected Screen Size”

This is under the hamburger menu at the path SUPPORT > About dCS Mosaic > View Details (under Mosaic Control Version)

No name tablet off amazon. I was using with the NAIM app fine…

hamburger menu? That’s on the app yes?

Steve

Upper left-hand corner of the screen.

688.17 x 1052.9

Damn strange screen size if you ask me!

Fixed… I had screen size set to Large to make icons etc… larger. Changed back to default and now it’s fine!

Sorry to hassle you.

btw is there a way to keep tha app active to stop screen standby/saver kicking in?

OK, so here’s what’s going on.

Mosaic needs at least 650 pixels of screen height in order to render in landscape (that’s the smaller of the two numbers reported). In your case Android is reporting 688.17dp which is over the threshold. The problem is that when you rotate into landscape the Android navigation bar gets dropped into place and that eats some amount of pixels (usually 50 - 80). At that point the screen isn’t tall enough and the app reverts back to portrait.

We have no way of getting any information on the navigation bar’s presence or dimensions so there’s no way to calculate what the value will be.

Some android tablets have a setting for “Screen Scaling” which is usually under the display group on the settings page, but it might be under accessibility. If you have that setting then try adjusting it to provide more room on the screen.

We set the detection threshold such that the app wouldn’t get into the state that you are seeing, but your tablet is reporting a very odd screen size.

You beat me to it :slight_smile:

No, we haven’t implemented this.

Cheers… good to have an explanation :slight_smile:

Okay… sorry another strange one.

It’s playing albums in track alphabetical order rather than track order!

When I select the album it shows the tracks in track order but when I select Play All it plays them in alphabetical order. The Queue show them listing alphabetically not in track number order :frowning:

Sorry I need more help.

Steve

This is an issue with some UPnP servers. When an album is queued the command that is issued to deliver the URLs for all of the tracks gets a response from the UPnP server that lists the tracks in an order other than track order (usually alphabetical, but I’ve seen a couple which appear to be random). Some servers allow this behavior to be changed and others do not.

This is one of the many reasons that we recommend the use of MinimServer. It behaves correctly in all of these cases.

Okay… I could append the track number to the start of the track title (using 2 digit numbering) and that should fix it.

Using Asset UPnP btw.

Yeah, that’s one of them that has presented problems.

Andrew, on a similar theme, but at a slightly more detailed level, although MinimServer plays the tracks in the correct order, is there any way of getting it to display track numbers? There are some recordings where this would be very useful.

For example I was playing a recording of short examples of various medieval instruments and combinations of them. There were 74 individual tracks and without track numbers it was hard to follow the explanation of each type in the booklet which was necessary with such unfamiliar material.

I had a look around and also couldn’t find a way to do this wither with Minim or Asset.

I’m wondering if the best method is to change the title of track to something like

track - title

That would solve both my problem (alphabetical order vs track order) and also display the track number as well.

In my music library all of the tracks as stored include the album track number e.g. 01 ABCXX, 02 CDEXX etc. It is just that MinimServer/Mosaic does not display them.

It was the same using Twonky as the server and I had hoped that switching to MinimServer would have fixed it. I cannot find anything helpful on the MinimServer community forum either.

I’m confused. If you changed the title to, for example,

was

“Chord Left”
to
“01 Chord Left”

but the app current playing still says “Chord Left”? Sounds like it’s reading the old title text.

On the Advanced tab of the MinimServer properties you can add the following to the tagFormat line:

Title.displayFormat={$tracknumber$title^^^ - }

There’s likely already an entry on that line as I think MinimServer ships with Artist.DisplayFormat defined. If so, then put a comma after the last entry and append the above. Restart MinimServer and tracks should display with the track number prepended.

If the number is in the actual track title tag then they should be displayed. There’s nothing in MinimServer that would strip that out and we just display what MinimServer sends.

The track numbers are usually automatically generated by dbpoweramp( in my case) for ripped files and are stored as part of the usual ID3 tagging matrix for FLACs ( uncompressed in my case) and also appear as part of the track title for each file in the folder for the album. There are many completed fields available within ID3 tagging that are also not capable of being displayed by Mosaic irrespective of server software. Perhaps the most important of these is “Composer” which is of particular significance to classical music enthusiasts like me but I have also found that the availability of “composer” would improve my experience for much of my jazz collection too.

For purchased and downloaded FLAC files the ID3 tagging data is usually completed by the record label and, again, track number is in its usual field.

It would seem to my simplistic judgement that the easiest solution would appear to be for either MinimServer and/or Mosaic to access and display the ID3 track number field as this would cover most ripped and downloaded repertoire at least for FLACs. I am unsure about .wav as tagging is less predictable.

I guess that a more universal method would be for the Mosaic software to simply count the number of items ( tracks) in a folder and allocate numbers in sequence. But what do I know?

Thanks Andrew. My latest posting must have crossed with yours in the server :slight_smile:

When I installed MinimServer ( the “for Melco” version as that is used as my NAS) there was no track number displayed subsequently in Mosaic so it can’t be a default setting as shipped, at least for that version. I will try changing the display format as you kindly suggest.

I concur.

tbh I’m not in love with minim… there seems to be a lot of menu options to simply choose an artist and then an album. It’s very long winded :frowning: