Recently Added and Recently Played
Table of contents
Introduction
Recently Added
Recently Played
The "recent" folder
This page describes the new support in MinimServer 2.1 for viewing and selecting recently added and recently played albums, groups and tracks.
Introduction
For some years, the most frequently requested enhancement to MinimServer has been support for showing files recently added to the library. Almost all UPnP servers support this capability, usually by showing a "flat list" of recently added files.
Support for showing recently added files is now available in MinimServer 2.1. This support includes a number of advanced and innovative features that are not provided by other servers. These features are described below.
- In MinimServer, support for viewing and selecting recently added files is fully integrated with the Intelligent Browsing feature. This means you can browse your recently added files by tags such as Genre, Artist, Composer, etc.
- You can browse your recently added files by different date ranges.
- You can view recently added albums, added audio files, groups and playlists.
- You can configure how many files are available in the "recently added" list.
- Retagging files (which changes the "last modified" timestamp) doesn't push these files to the top of the "recently added" list.
- MinimServer 2.1 also supports viewing and selecting recently played files with the same user interface and advanced capabilities as recently added files.
Recently Added
To enable the Recently Added feature, add the special index entry *RecentAdded to
indexTags and restart MinimServer. In the MinimServer index menus, this will show as
Recently Added or a translation depending on your MinimServer language setting.
To see your recently added audio files and playlists, select the Recently Added index entry. You can select this from the top-level menu or from another menu after making browsing selections. This displays a menu with various recent time periods (last day, last week, last month and last 3 months), depending on what recently added files are in your library. If the files in a time period are the same as the files in a more recent time period, only the more recent time period is shown in the menu. For example, if all recently added files from the last week are also from the last day, the menu shows "Last day" but not "Last week."
The Recently Added menu also includes up to three year group selections and a Show All selection. All recently added files appear under one of the year group selections and in the Show All selection.
When you choose one of the selections under Recently Added, you will see your recently added files for the selected date range. This information is displayed in the same way as other MinimServer index menus except that the first three entries (n albums, n items and n playlists) provide complete lists of all albums, all items and all playlists in the selected date range, sorted in "date added" order with the most recent additions first.
The number of recently added files (audio files and playlists) saved by MinimServer is set to 300 by default.
You can change this value by setting the recentAdded option of the serverOptions property.
The maximum value is 1000.
On the first library scan after you have set the *RecentAdded entry in indexTags, the "date added"
value for each audio file or playlist in the "recently added" list is set to the "last modified" timestamp
of the file. This is because MinimServer cannot know when the file was actually added. On subsequent scans,
MinimServer uses its cache to identify new audio files and playlists that have been added since the last scan
and sets the "date added" value for these files to the current time of the scan. Audio files that have been updated
since the last scan (for example, by making tag changes) retain their existing "date added" value.
For playlists that have been modified since the last scan, the modification is considered a significant change
and the "date added" value is updated to the current time of the scan.
When doing a library scan, MinimServer uses the absolute file path of each audio file or playlist file to determine whether the file has been added or changed since the last scan. This means that renaming a file will cause it to be treated as a newly added file and appear at the top of the "recently added" list.
Recently Played
To enable the Recently Played feature, add the special index entry *RecentPlayed to
indexTags and restart MinimServer. In the MinimServer index menus, this will show as
Recently Played or a translation depending on your MinimServer language setting.
To see your recently played audio files, select Recently Played. This selection works in exactly the same way as the Recently Added selection described in the Recently Added section above. The list of recently played files is updated in real time and changes are reflected immediately in the browsing menus without needing a MinimServer restart or rescan.
The number of recently played audio files saved by MinimServer is set to 300 by default.
You can change this value by setting the recentPlayed option of the serverOptions property.
The maximum value is 1000.
The "recent" folder
The information needed by the Recently Added and Recently Played features is contained in
a folder named recent. This folder is under the same parent folder as the MinimServer
etc folder (except on Synology, where it is a subfolder of the etc folder).
The recent folder contains files named added-dates.txt,
added-files.txt and played-files.txt.
The added-dates.txt file contains essential information that is needed
by MinimServer to correctly display the "recently added" list of files. This information
is not held in any other MinimServer configuration file and this file should be backed up
regularly to ensure the information it contains is not lost. If the "recently added" feature
is enabled, this file is created or updated automatically by MinimServer on every
rescan that adds new files. This file should not be changed by the user.
The added-files.txt file is for information only and lists the
current list of recently added files shown in the RecentlyAdded index.
It doesn't need to be backed up because it is refreshed by MinimServer on every restart or rescan
using information in the MinimServer library and the added-dates.txt file.
The played-files.txt file contains essential information that is needed
by MinimServer to correctly display the "recently played" list of files. This information
is not held in any other MinimServer configuration file and this file should be backed up
regularly to ensure the information it contains is not lost.
If the "recently played" feature is enabled, this file is updated automatically
by MinimServer when any audio file is streamed. This file should not be changed by the user.