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Author Topic: Gizmo and "Duplicate" Albums  (Read 2332 times)

TedM37395

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Gizmo and "Duplicate" Albums
« on: September 15, 2016, 07:30:40 pm »

My music collection is mainly classical and Broadway cast recordings. I have a number of albums that are different performances of the same work. That means the album title is the same ("Beethoven: Symphony No. 7", "Fiddler on the Roof") but the "Artist" and "Album Artist" fields are different ("New York Philharmonic, Leonard Bernstein", "Vienna Philharmonic, Carlos Kleiber"; "Broadway Cast Recording", "London Cast Recording", "Film Soundtrack").

MC itself correctly displays the "duplicate" albums separately, as does the iOS MonkeyMote app. But Gizmo in Album view shows only one album. Selecting it shows a collated set of tracks from all the different albums. The tracks for the first album appear in sequence, followed by tracks from the second, etc. (That's at least better than listing the Track 1's from each album, followed by the Track 2's, etc.) I don't know whether this behavior is a bug or an intentional design decision. Either way, I suspect this doesn't affect the vast majority of users who listen to pop genres (and probably use the Artist view anyway). But I find it annoying.

One obvious solution would be to manually edit those "duplicate" albums to give them unique titles. But I'd prefer not to spend time doing that. Is there perhaps a setting I don't know about that can make it consistent with what MC itself does?

One other annoyance is that Now Playing truncates the title and album fields rather than scrolling them horizontally so the entire text is visible. This is also more likely to be a problem with classical music, where the title might contain a lengthy "marking" or a concatenated composer, work, and movement title. Is there a technical reason why scrolling these fields is impractical, or is it a design decision?

I am using version 21.0.1 of Gizmo, apparently the latest.
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blgentry

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Re: Gizmo and "Duplicate" Albums
« Reply #1 on: September 16, 2016, 07:46:40 am »

What Gizmo (and JRemote) see is controlled by:

Tools > Options > Media Network > Advanced > Customize views...

It sounds like the Albums view there only distinguishes by the [Album] field and doesn't use anything else.  But you can change this.  If your Albums view in Audio works correctly, you can COPY that into the views used by Gizmo.  Just use the ADD button on the above dialog and put it somewhere in the Gizmo audio tree.  Maybe give it a distinct name, so you can be sure of which version you are using.

When you are done making changes, click OK to get out.  Importantly, to see these changes, you need to restart MC *and* Gizmo.

Hopefully that will help.

Brian.
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TedM37395

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Re: Gizmo and "Duplicate" Albums
« Reply #2 on: September 17, 2016, 12:07:31 pm »

Thanks, Brian!

Unfortunately, I could not figure out how to make that work. I tried clicking the Add button and selecting Audio\Albums under Library Items from Standard View. That added a new category under Audio, which behaved the same way the existing Album view in Gizmo (after restarting MC and Gizmo).

I then tried editing the the existing Album view by adding Album Artist after Album in the Show Categories In This Order box. I've been consistent about setting the Album Artist field, as before I switched to JRiver it was the only way Winamp could handle Broadway cast recordings with different artists for each track.

Now when I select a "duplicated" album, another screen comes up with just those albums. Selecting one of them brings up the list of its tracks. This isn't quite what I wanted, but it's a big improvement.
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blgentry

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Re: Gizmo and "Duplicate" Albums
« Reply #3 on: September 17, 2016, 12:40:51 pm »

What you want is for Gizmo to group albums by album and by artist.  Make a new view in the Gizmo/JRemote area as before.  Just have one category:  Album .  Now edit that category and change it from Library field to Expression.  See my screen shot for an example of how I set it up on my system.  This seems to work great for the small number of duplicated album names I have.

Good luck.
Brian.
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TedM37395

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Re: Gizmo and "Duplicate" Albums
« Reply #4 on: September 18, 2016, 05:12:37 pm »

That did the trick.
Thanks!

Ted
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