I've been trying a variety of DLNA servers over the last few days looking to replace WMP which is beginning to lag with the amount of media I have accumulated over 30 years...
My clients are almost entirely Denon receivers, an x4520 and an x4000 being the primaries. My media is almost 100% audio in FLAC format. Quality, not space... The Denons support FLAC playback so no transcoding is required & after tweaking a bit I got JRiver to deliver the flac files natively. yay! lossless digital audio delivered via the network.
The problem I am running into with the JRiver server, which if I can resolve the annoyance will result in JRiver being the server of choice, is ... I have a strong preference for browsing by music by Artist, then Album. It's how I function... I really want the albums listed under each artist to be sorted by date released, not by alphabetical order. The first album a band released should be the first in the list, the last ... the last. The order in which the albums are released in shows far more about the evolution of a band and it's music over time than an alphabetical listing of album titles.
I can do this easily with Plex. In fact, plex appends the album release date to the end of the album name in the display on the Denon receivers as well; i.e. [A Momentary Lapse of Reason (1987)] , [The Division Bell (1994)], etc... weather I sort by release date or not but it has it's problems. It doesn't run as a service so you have to be logged in for the dlna server to run. It doesn't support pause, fast forward, rewind, etc... It's either play or stop and start over @ the beginning.
In JRiver, I found Tools\Options - Media Network - Advanced - Customize views for Gismo & WebGizom... Here I found the Artist group under Audio and altered the album sort via the edit button. I also tried adding a Set Rules for file Display option to sort based on Date as well, & by year, but making changes here has no effect for the content displayed @ the Denon receivers or other hardware dlna clients I have around the house... Android phone & Tablet, etc...
Can this be done?
How?
Must I edit the names of the albums and prepend them all with the release date myself? ... then allow the normal sort to apply? This is one hell of a lot of work for more than 1000 albums...
Any help would be greatly appreciated. Other than how it presents the media to hardware dlna clients, JRiver is exactly what I'm looking for in a dlna media server for the house.
Thanks,
Steven DiGiuseppe