I'm always interested in why people don't use the music library, especially since your reasons are about music selection. Some I can see are achievable now, others not yet (but could inspire new features).
Quote:I can break down the artists alphabetically to avoid having an enormous list to scroll through
You can also do this with custom nodes (I'm sure there is an example from Zag elsewhere on the forum), but you can also use filter from the side blade to do that.
Quote:Less 'noise', i.e. no artists who would appear in the list because they're on one track of a compilation
Simply set "Show song and album artists" setting to disabled and only see album artists.
Quote:I have more control over the arrangement using folders, e.g. put albums by, say "Toby Jepson" and "Toby and the Whole Truth" in the same folder.
Ah, grouping artists. No the library can't do that, not unless you tag all the albums with the same album artist and that is clunky (and hard work if using musicbrainz tags). Added to my list of things users do that the library doesn't support.
Quote:If I have a multi-channel album ripped, I can have with a stereo version in one folder and a 5.1 version in another so I only go looking for the 5.1 version if I'm on the box attached to the surround receiver.
I don't think there is a standard (or even commonly used) tag for number of channels, although I guess it must be a file property, so the library does not have standard way to differentiate these. But you could use a path rule in smartplaylists or custom nodes if you have named folders consistently.
Give library a go perhaps?
But for the UPnP question you need the guy that was working on it, and he seems to be busy with other stuff at the moment.