When you still buy some files instead of streaming from Qobuz/Tidal for example, a way of sorting the files is through the creation or import date of the file. This sorting is embedded is few server software like Roon or JRiver but it is lacking for years on some well established UPnP servers like minimserver. Simon, the creator of minimserver has this option in the « todo list » since years but still not available. We can mention that this feature is available on the Lumin application through a specific tab and i assume it is linked to the Lumin app functionality that is creating this date when it screens the server for the updates. For this reason and because of motivation given by few posts on a french forum, i tried to have a look to this topic.
In few words, it is possible to do this kind of sorting quite easily and for free. What you need is for sure minimserver and MP3Tag as software. The idea is to create a specific tag kinked to the creation date and populate automatically the creation date into this tag. The last step, will be to indicate to minimserver that it can use this new tags. The follow-up example will show how to sort the files by year and month (YYYY-MM) but you can change according to the date format of your country or…to your needs.
Let’s start, first, download MP3Tag from the editor’s link. Next, you need to select the directories of your music you want to update : go to “File” and “Change Directory”
As soon as you would have selected the directories, MP3Tag will collect the tag informations. Go to « edit » and « select all files ». Next step is to create a specific tag we can name « CREATION_DATE » For this, you need to click on the « tag » icon and create a new one (add field icon). As name, choose the one you like (for me CREATION_DATE) and in field, as you need to put something, you can type « temp » for example. As soon as you would validate, MP3Tag will create this special tag for all the selected files in the selected directory.
Next step is to create a specific « Action » that will integrate the date of creation of the file into the specific tag « CREATION DATE ». Go to “Actions” and select “Actions”. Select the icon “New” on the right and give a name like….”CREATION_DATE”. After that, go to the “edit” icon. In “field” you can put “CREATION_DATE”, it corresponds to the specifi tag created previously. Concerning the format string you can select and play with the parameters :
These parameters “$regexp(%_file_create_date%,(..)/(..)/(….),$3$2$1)” would lead to a format like “YYYYMMDD“. Personnaly i selected the following parameters “$regexp(%_file_create_date%,(..)/(..)/(….),$3-$2)” in order to obtain the following output “YYYY-MM“. As soon as you select this action, the selected files will be updated accordingly.
Now that the job with MP3Tag is finished, you need to tell to minimserver how to handle it. This is quite easy. You need to open minimwatch while minimserver is running and select “properties” tab. You would fall on the below screen.
You need to go to “index tags” and “CREATION_DATE:Date d’ajout”. You can change the wording after the “:” in order to reflect your needs (mine was in french). When done, you can “apply” and launch a rescan from minimwatch.
In terms of results, you just need to go to your UPnP Control Point, in my case Linn Kazoo, select minimserver and you would see appearing the “Date d’ajout” tag with the format YYYY-MM . By selecting the year and month of creation date, you can after navigate through albums, typology of music, artist, year….
Hope this small tutorial will help you. Thanks a lot also to Mellowman, french guy on french forum who initiated the discussion and helped me to go further on this approach quite automatized.