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[csimon]

Hi, I'm a newbie, only been playing with JRiver for a few days for its DLNA capabilities. It's far more flexible and easy to use than anything else I've tried and, above all, the DLNA server actually works along with the custom views which allow me to sort and categorise in any way I want!!

One confusing thing though.  In some cases I would like my custom views to skip a level if only one item is returned at that level. In other words, it will basically automatically select that item and move onto the next level.  An example of this might be if I am drilling down by artist and I only have one album for that artist, I might want to go straight to the track listing for that album.  Or if there is a category which doesn't have a value for this particular album, I don't want a menu with a single item of "unassigned" displayed, I just want it to skip that and move on to the next level.  (The exact situation is when I am using CD# to organise multi-CD sets, I want to get a menu of all CDs in that set if there is more than one, and if there is only one CD, as will be the case with most albums, or if the CD# field isn't populated, I want that menu level to be bypassed.)

When using WebRemote, this seems to happen perfectly.  But when using the DLNA server, menus of a single item are displayed and not skipped.  Ideally, I'd like to be able to set this skip facility on individual menu items and not globally for all levels, but in any case I can't find any global configuration for this in either the WebRemote setup or the DLNA server setup, and the way I've set up both servers is exactly the same.

Is this an unintentional difference between the way the two services work?  And is there any way to get the DLNA server to behave in this way?

[csimon]

<bump>
I still see this behaviour with release 15.0.118.  Is this indeed the way it behaves or have I missed a configuration setting in the DLNA server somewhere?  And should this difference be rectified?  I would really like the DLNA server to be able to skip single items.

An example of the behaviour I'm seeing.  I use Album Artist, Title, Album and Genre tags as normal, but also use Composer for specifying Albums, 7" singles, 12" singles, CD Singles, Live Albums, & Compilations.  I use Grouping to define the Part of Set, e.g. Volume 1/Volume2, Original Album/Bonus Tracks, etc.

If there is a particular artist for whom I only have Live Albums and there is no multi-CD set for that collection, my Composer field for all tracks contains "Live Albums" and my Grouping field is blank.

Via Web Remote, the drill-down works as follows:

List of Artists
 >My Artist Name
  >> List of Albums by My Artist
   >>> List of tracks on the selected Album

Via the DLNA server I get:

List of Artists
 > My Artist Name
  >> "Live Albums"
   >>> List of Albums by My Artist
    >>>> "unassigned"
     >>>>> List of tracks on the selected Album

[Matt]

Currently skipping of levels is up to the client, and the DLNA server doesn't do it automatically.  WebRemote is different since it kind of is the client (in the form of HTML pages).

It would be a good feature to let the server handle the skipping.  Hopefully someday.

[csimon]

Ah, I see!

Well, in the hope that it could be handled via the server at some point, I'd just like to add that it would be useful to be able to specify this property on the individual step item rather than globally as, in my example, I would want the Composer and Grouping levels to be skipped for a single item, but not at the Artist and Album levels.

It's no big deal if everything is skipped, it's just that this is the way you expect to drill down intuitively.  If you only have one Artist in your Z category, you still expect to be presented with that Artist's name.  If you only have one Album by an Artist, you still expect to see that Album listed.  But if you have multi-CD sets in your collection, you only want to be offered the choice of which CD to choose if there is more than one.  And if you have some other arbitrary categorisation of you collection, as in my case the Live Albums, Compilations, Albums, Singles etc category, again you only want to be offered the choice if there is a choice.  It's just the way I visualise my collection...