Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[blgentry]

In another thread someone asked about showing file type (FLAC, MP3, etc) and other info on top of the album cover.  He also asked about different versions of different albums, like the MP3 version, the FLAC version, a high res version, etc.

MC can't superimpose text on top of album thumbnails, but it can certainly display any text you want below album thumbnails.  All you have to do, is go to the top menu of your view and select Thumbnails > Thumbnail Text .  Then type in what you want to see.  I'm going to do some examples.

Let's start with showing the Artist then the Album, then the format and resolution:

Code: [Select]

[Album Artist (auto)]
[Album]
([File Type] [Bit Depth]bit math(formatnumber([Sample Rate])/1000)kHz/)

Now we can be more clever and add some color coding to it.  Here I'm making MP3 files appear with green text (in the file type) and red text if the file is greater than 44.1kHz sampling rate (in the resolution part):

Code: [Select]

[Album Artist (auto)]
[Album]
(if(isequal([File Type],MP3,1),<font color="00FF00">,)[File Type]if(isequal([File Type],MP3,1),<//font>,) if(compare([Sample Rate],>,44100),<font color="FF0000">,)[Bit Depth]bit math(formatnumber([Sample Rate])/1000)kHz/<//font>)

You can customize this kind of thing to use colors wherever you want.  See first screen shot for an example.

What about separating out different versions of the same album?  This is a complex topic.  I could link you to earlier discussions about this that detail various solutions.  Here's a summary of how I see it:

A.  You can add a new field to MC to hold extra album information.  I call mine "Album_info".  You then put identifying information in this field for things like release date, format (SACD, DVD-A, etc), or release type.  You can then make your views use that info to separate albums.  Thumbnail text can then be added that optionally displays [Album_info] when it's present.

B.  However, this is not a complete solution because JRemote (and other remotes) can't see these views that you make.  Unless you copy them to JRemote's views.  Which isn't very hard.  So then it *almost* works perfectly.  Except that searching in JRemote (and others) can't see your album_info field.  So you end up with mixed search results from all versions of the same album.

Because of B above, I now use distinct [Album] fields for each version of an album.  I still use [Album_info] to store extra info I want displayed.  But I give each version of an album a specific name so they come up separately in searches within remotes.  See second screen shot for an example.

I'm going to end this here so you can play with thumbnail text and see how it works.  If you end up wanting more info on separating albums based on criteria, we can continue that discussion in this thread.

Good luck.

Brian.

[bluesplayer1957]

Thanks Brian,

This is great and solves my dilemma, although I still think an overlaid badge would be a neater solution and take up less screen real estate. Something to put in the bag for future releases perhaps. Seems like with DSD and MQA files increasing in popularity, multiple album versions and quality may become a common problem.  However, thanks for taking the time to show me this and I'll have to look into expression language when I get some time. Cheers