Apologies if this has been raised before but I couldn’t find this specific topic.
When I search my Melco (using MinimServer) on my Bartok the results can be rather infuriating.
For instance if I enter ‘Crosby Stills Nash & Young’ it returns that no artist is found
If however I search for ‘Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’ it finds the artist and all 8 albums I have on my Melco.
Surely this is a really basic issue that should have been resolved. The search criteria are too specific.
Can you describe your setup in a bit more detail. I assume you are using the Melco N1 as a Music Server, playing music from its internal storage via USB to the Bartok.
The standard app to use for Melco is either the iOS Melco app or mConnect for Android. MinimServer on the Melco is infinitly customizable. This is how I have configured my MinimServer:
This setup allows you to drill down, if your albums are tagged
I don’t use the Melco app. I control playback with Mosaic mostly on my iPhone (occasionally on iPad) and I know the file data is correct as I use SongKong to make sure of that. The connection to the Bartok is by Ethernet cable not USB.
This isn’t really either a MinimServer, Melco or Mosaic issue. It relates to your consistency in creating metadata when making files. It seems that you are searching for two different artists as far as computer logic is concerned one with items separated by commas the other not. The MinimServer options referred to by Rudi only affect the items chosen as criteria to search and the order of hierarchy.
Unfortunately where fuzzy logic has been used in search engines to attempt to overcome this it is often not much better then trying different forms of subject spelling or other criteria. So although the full name when searching may cause confusion where spelling is changed, for CSNY albums just entering Crosby in artist search should find them all plus Crosby’s solo albums if you have those.
Thanks for your reply Pete but in all honesty I can search in any streaming service app for Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young without the commas and it finds them. Why can’t Mosaic behave in the same way and just ignore commas when I search my own database? As a simple user I couldn’t really care less about the technicalities of it. It is surely solvable!
I use the other upnp service on Melco (that one is for free and is SQ wise on par!) I don’t like minnim whatever because of re-scan, metadata etc.
I just checked Qobuz for CSNY. With commas it finds 105 results ,without 85. You can tell by the numbers that it didn’t find exactly the same albums given the small spelling change. Of course most of the results are not genuine CSNY albums.
@nickghough As Pete said, this is simply a question of how MinimServer (on the Melco) interacts with the metadata you have chosen to apply to your music. Melco comes with MinimServer and Mosaic is designed to be able to interact with MinimServer. Mosaic (and dCS) only read what MinimServer outputs. There is no fuzzy logic at work here.
If you want to do away with the issue you are encountering, I am afraid you will have to use one of two choices:
Unfortunately no amount of “this shoudl be a piece of cake” will make your problem go away.
Don’t forget that when you search on a streaming service, that service can throw all manner of search resources at your request. Fuzzy or otherwise. When you do it in Mosaic against MinimServer, as well as the creator of MinimServer does his best in coding that search engine, it’s no comparison to the likes of Qobuz, Tidal, Deezer and whatnot.
I find it interesting that some of you who have kindly responded seem to be leaping to the defence of the poor struggling programmer. Undoubtedly the resources available are probably incomparable between say Qobuz and dCS but surely it’s not THAT difficult to have the search engine ignore simple punctuation!?
It is not Mosaic that does the actual database search. It just passes your query to MinimServer, and shows what the latter returns.
SongKong uses different sources to assign metadata to your music. That is part of the issue youj are seeing. You have no control over what SongKong does and to assume that metadata will be consistent and complete after a SongKong pass is a daring assumption at best. I tried SongKong once with a subset of my library and was left underwhelmed. Different spellings of the same artist etc. I went back to manual tagging using jRiver.
Thanks for your message but that is not the issue. I checked the metadata after running SongKong and it is correct. The issue is a search issue not a metadata issue.
If you see this as a search issue, then logic would dictate that you address it to the developer of the element in your chain that executes the search, which is minimserver. The search request of Mosaic is handled by minimserver and the result is handed back to Mosaic.
Maybe post your issue on the minimserver forum: https://forum.minimserver.com/
Hi Nick,
Firstly please can I apologise for the delay in replying to your ticket - I have only just returned from Munich and am catching up with the last week of activity on the forums.
When we do any searching on MinimServer from Mosaic we pass the search string to MinimServer and await a list of returns from MinimServer as there is no support within the UPnP specs for searching an entire library - this is an additional function that is provided by MinimServer which is one of the reasons that we recommend it.
As such then this is something that would probably be worth reporting to Simon at MinimServer for his comment.
I’d suggest that it also might be a help to consider in this instance searching for “Crosby” instead of “Crosby, Stills and Nash” as that will then include “Crosby Stills and Nash” and “Crosby, Stills & Nash” as well as “Crosby Stills & Nash” but of course it will also bring up “Bing Crosby” but just modifying the search term can be a very powerful tool - for example I have “Beatles”, “The Beatles” and “Beatles, The” in my collection here so searching for “The Beatles” doesn’t actually give me all my music from the Fab Four…
BR
Phil
Phil
Since our last exchange on here I have been in contact with Alan at Melco and Simon at MinimServer to try and get to the bottom of what the real issues are that I find when I try and search my extensive music collection on my Melco with Mosaic.
I was prompted to take this up again after I looked for Sigur Ros. I typed ‘Sigur Ros’ and the search returned no artists or albums found. I then added the accent on the ‘o’ and searched for ‘Sigur Rós’ and it quickly found the band and all five albums I have.
Simon informed me that there is no way to get MinimServer to ignore accents or punctuation without the risk of a search returning false positives. I pointed out that I would rather have false positives than false negatives and start fretting that my music database had been corrupted! (In the above example I checked the files via my computer to make sure I wasn’t losing my mind before re-doing the search with the accent!)
Another contributor on the MinimServer forum pointed out that they have no such issues with Kazoo.
I now under stand that Kazoo uses progressive search so typing S-i-g quickly revealed Sigur Rós but Mosaic does not use progressive search.
My question is why not? Given it seems MinimServer isn’t going to be changed to start ignoring accents could Mosaic not be changed to use progressive search?
On Melco, you could use the other upnp service (twonky?) for free as well. That’s what I do and it works without any hickups since years…
You were fortunate. I had a disastrous time using Twonky. Many of its problems seemed to arise from an inability to distinguish between albums of the same title but having different artists at least when receiving commands from Mosaic. For example both Stacey Kent and Kurt Elling have made albums titled " Close Your Eyes". As Twonky could not tell them apart, when I wanted Kurt Elling I got the right cover art but Stacey Kent was not to be found. The track orrder to be given was track 1 Kurt Elling, track 2 Stacey Kent, Track 3 Kurt Elling, Track 4 Stacey Kent etc.
Of the five versions of the Fantastic Symphony only three were ever found with the remaining two turning up as additional tracks to other versions. Same with Elgar Symphonies 1 or 2.
Just examples. Of course an update to correct the matter will never happen as Twonky closed some years ago.
I’d have to agree with Pete here.
I had similar issues, added to which MinimServer is noticeably quicker, is preferred/recommended I believe by both Melco and dCS and I’m told sounds better, albeit I have always struggled to tell a very significant difference.
There was an interesting issue that I would get reported quite frequently with Twonky over the years…
Customers would report that some of their albums were appearing multiple times and when you looked it seemed that an entire section of the collection had been duplicated, and then a portion of that would be duplicated, and then a portion of that would get duplicated … forcing Twonky to do a rescan would get rid of all the duplicates again for a while until it started to do it again.
I never could work out what triggered that but it was something that I saw regularly enough to be confident that just sending a reply saying “Just try doing a rescan in Twonky and I think you’ll be fine…” would be enough to fix it. 
