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[Daudio]

I'm new to JRiver (Mac), but have used iTunes heavily for the last 6 years. Before I retired I built business apps from db based systems, so I didn't just get off the boat.

This implementation of JRiver is for a friends audiophile music server, that I'm setting up for him. JRiver was chosen for its DLNA support, for his PS Audio Bridge II card (an issue to deal with later )

While building his music library, I have created a Group of playlists, both Smart and 'manual' (?). In the smart playlists, after I define the rules and get data, I finally figured out (tiny little down arrow hiding out next to the Tab text) how to group the tracks into albums, via the "Album Thumbnail".

But I do not see the same options in the manual (ordinary/normal/ ??) type Playlist  !  What is wrong here ?? Obviously one has similar needs to group tracks in both types of playlists, and the same underlying code is there to do the job, so what am I missing ?

Thanks,
Dave

[blgentry]

I understand what you're asking for.  I'm not 100% sure how you (or your friend/client) are intending to use these lists.  For example, when you do this "show as Album Thumbnails" thing, all songs are grouped under the one album cover and you can't access the individual songs at all.  For those smart lists, you might enjoy the Group By > Album setting better.  Or not; as I said I'm not sure how you are intending to use this.

For manual playlists, your observation is correct:  There isn't a direct way to group them under albums just like Smartlists.  Manual lists are (as far as I can tell) intended to be ordered lists.  I guess that's why MC doesn't include addition display and grouping options for them.

But let's back up a step so I can help you out.  Coming from itunes is kind of like having only a hammer in your tool box.  How do you do task X?  With a Playlist of course!  This is Itunes.  How do you do task Y?  Playlist.  Task Q?  Playlist.

MC's paradigms are quite a bit different than Itunes, which is a good thing actually.  Whenever you want to do custom display stuff, or grouping, or searching or sorting, the MC View is probably what you want to use.  Views allow you to manipulate what you see based on different criteria and have many, many options.  Depending on exactly what you're trying to do, making a custom View might be the answer.

So let me finally get around to telling you one way to do what you want with your manual playlists:

What you want to end up with is a custom View that is a Panes type view.  Click on Audio Panes for an example.  In this custom panes view, you want to make the first column (Pane) a Playlist column.  Right click on it, select Edit and then change it's type to Playlist Group and select "root" as the starting point.

Now when you click on a playlist name in that pane, you'll see all of your playlist songs below.  They will now obey the grouping and display settings that you apply to this new Custom Playlist View that you've just built.  Click on the tiny down arrow at the top for several display, sorting, and grouping options.  The default is pretty good though because it shows and album thumbnail and all of the songs right next to it.

I hope that gets you started.  Good luck!

Brian.

[Daudio]

Brian,

First, Thanks for the long, considered reply !

Second, I'm not that happy with your iTunes=hammer, playlist=nail analogy. I have built a hierarchical Genre library system (ignoring the meta-data field) for my 1+ TB lib., using playlists. And I don't consider them limited, any more then any other db result set, in a formatted report, display list, or part of a input U/I. Anyway, moving on...

To answer your 'what are the intentions for the playlists' query (a good place to start ...

To me directed search is easy enough, the tough part is browsing, and it gets tougher the larger the data set grows. I want to provide a set of playlists / displays / views / whatever to collect groups of related albums that fit certain criteria. Some of the criteria are good fits for a rule based retrieval like "Comment field contains "blue note"". But others are too idiosyncratic, and need to be hand selected, like "Albums with special sound quality that don't fit any other rule".

A little more specifically, I want a set of playlists that select out albums by Record Label (I have inserted the record label data in a coded prefix in the Album Name field, or in the Comment field, after ripping).  I've created this extra data for all Classical and many audiophile tracks. Now the task is to make the display screens for the various labels (or combinations) to select out of the huge mass of tracks, a more digestible set for browsing and possible selection for play. I also have data for and need  'displays' for certain technical characteristics, like "XRCD", "HDCD", and Hi-Res sample rate.

I also had in mind 4 or 5 'displays'  for 'meta genres' (i.e: grouping Rock, pop, blues, etc.) to, again, break down the huge mass of data into something more manageable for casual, or directed browsing. This server will be used in sales situations where quick, quality, music selection, with a low cognitive overhead, is necessary.

Now, I have already whipped together all of these 'displays' in iTunes, and am now just trying to recreate something similar in JRiver, since that is the (very non-geek) customers only realistic player option to use his PS Audio bridge cards Ethernet input.

So there is the background    Now to get down to brass tacks, Eariler I did spend a little time reading about the views and panes, but only enough to be confused and unenlightened. Sunday I wandered around the  "Customize View" window, but I was thrown off by it's maybe-association to a Playlist Group, or Smart playlist. The Customize window just didn't make much sense, nor was I able to accomplish anything with it, even going so far as to Save a 'View' in hopes of 'Loading' a Saved 'Album Thumbnail' View in my dumb playlist. But my saved View never showed up again. Anyway the point is I spent some time playing around with that stuff, but it still makes little to no sense to me

Now I read your suggestions to create a Custom View, but "Click on Audio Panes" is a bridge too far for me right now. I'm not sure where to start, since I don't see a nice clean "New View" menu command  . Does it matter where to start ? From the menu bar, or some Playlist group ? Can you explain the beginnings for me ?

Sorry to be a bit dense, but that is kinda my way, I struggle with the basics some at first, but then pick up speed fast afterwards 

Thanks again,
Dave


P.S This Interact Spell Checker doesn't even know how to spell "JRiver" !! Nor does it seem to be able to learn anything. Kinda like some forum posters I know (Not Here !) 

[blgentry]

Second, I'm not that happy with your iTunes=hammer, playlist=nail analogy. I have built a hierarchical Genre library system[...]

Please don't take offense.  I was mostly trying to make a point:  Playlists are sort of the "center of the universe" in ITunes.  With MC it's different.  Views tend to be the way to get those type tasks done.  Plus MC has lots of other tools that ITunes does not.  Plus I thought my analogy was funny.    I'm not nearly as funny as I usually think I am!

A little more specifically, I want a set of playlists that select out albums by Record Label (I have inserted the record label data in a coded prefix in the Album Name field, or in the Comment field, after ripping).

My initial reaction here is that you want to use a custom field to hold this information.  You can almost certainly extract this information from your two data sources (comment field and album name field) and put them in one central place.  Are you aware that you can define your own data fields in MC?  Are you aware that you can do "coded" fields that run expressions to pull data from other fields?  One or both of these approaches will probably make your task easier *and* give you a bunch more power.

https://wiki.jriver.com/index.php/Library_Fields#Predefined_and_Custom_Fields

I also have data for and need  'displays' for certain technical characteristics, like "XRCD", "HDCD", and Hi-Res sample rate.

Again, I'd make a custom field and put that data into that field.  Then you can use that field in your Views and/or SmartLists.

I also had in mind 4 or 5 'displays'  for 'meta genres' (i.e: grouping Rock, pop, blues, etc.) to, again, break down the huge mass of data into something more manageable for casual, or directed browsing. This server will be used in sales situations where quick, quality, music selection, with a low cognitive overhead, is necessary.

A set of views would do this nicely.  Or Smarlists. Views are just quite a bit more flexible.

[...]customers only realistic player option to use his PS Audio bridge cards Ethernet input.

You should test this a good bit to make sure the playback type and behavior matches expectations.  DLNA based playback is quite different than USB based playback.  For instance, did you know that the default for DLNA is to re-encode everything to MP3?  You'll probably want to change that.

Eariler I did spend a little time reading about the views and panes, but only enough to be confused and unenlightened.

I understand for sure.  MC is a big beast.  It's documentation is not centralized or super duper well maintained.  A lot of the info is actually here in the forum.  Keep an open mind and you'll be a JRiver MC rock star pretty quickly I think.  This article, by my man Marko, is excellent.  It's got enough info in it to deserve being read 2 or 3 times.  This should really get you kick started:

https://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=68960.0

Once you have experimented some with Views, come back if you have questions.  I'd be happy to help out with the custom fields ideas I discussed above.

Good luck!

Brian.

[Daudio]

Brian,

I have used defined fields since... 1985 ? Once calculated rollable steel grades from ingot chemistry data using them

While cool and all, not always the right solution. In this case not maintainable by my customer. But I did have an idea after plowing through the linked tutorial (thank you).

I added a Genre Category view to Audio and created a new field call Meta_Genre, which replaced the Genre (tag) field in the stock view. I sketched out some pseudo-code, then tried to recast it in JR-code.  I pasted it into the def. fields Expression box, and tested. I get a "Expression Error(unknown)"

Here is my expression code:

Code: [Select]

    =If(IsEqual([Genre],alternative,8),        Pop/Rock,
  (IsEqual([Genre],pop,8), Pop/Rock,
  (IsEqual([Genre],reggae,8), Pop/Rock,
  (IsEqual([Genre],rock,8), Pop/Rock,
  (IsEqual([Genre],ambient,8), Electronic,
  (IsEqual([Genre],dance,8), Electronic,
  (IsEqual([Genre],electronic,8), Electronic,
  (IsEqual([Genre],classical,8), Classical,
  (IsEqual([Genre],country,8), Artists,
  (IsEqual([Genre],blues,8), Artists,
  (IsEqual([Genre],folk,8), Artists,
  (IsEqual([Genre],r&b,8), Artists,
  (IsEqual([Genre],singer,8), Artists,
  (IsEqual([Genre],jazz,8), Jazz,
  (IsEqual([Genre],latin,8), Jazz,
  (IsEqual([Genre],easy,8), “New Age”,
  (IsEqual([Genre],”new age”,8), “New Age”,
  “Other”

Note:   IsEqual(val1, val2,   -  (8 = case insensitive substring search)


See any problems ?

TIA

[blgentry]

1.  If you don't want to use calculated fields, you might want to use some expressions to statically extract the data from your other fields.  You said you had Record Company encoded into other fields.  Using some regex() or other magic, you can almost certainly pull that data out and put it into it's own field.  It might require a few passes, but once you have the data in it's own field, it's done.

2.  Your giant expression is way too big to examine in detail at this time of day... it's been sort of a rough day here.  But right off the bat I'm pretty sure you should be using IfElse() instead of If().  That's probably the whole problem.

Again, good luck.

Brian.

[Daudio]

Brian,

Thanks for the 'IfElse' catch ! That, and too many parentheses, were the problem. It runs now 

And, really, that wasn't a 'Giant' block of code, just the same line repeated with different arguments. I tried to line up the columns for readability, but tabs just don't seem to translate

I do have an issue with the display values of my new field. They are showing up with an "=" preceding the text... Oops, just figured that out . And the double quotes I inserted due to an embedded space... I have never seen a language so loose with spaces before... hard to adjust  And it's a pain trying to debug with no error descriptions, jumping through hoops to edit code and rerun. I think a number of the errors I made were due to unclear language documentation.

Oh, well, I got it working very nicely now, better then I expected ! But that still doesn't make me a big fan of Customize Views. Not yet. I can handle complexity, but try to live by KISS, and all the more so when I'm working on something for a non-sophisticated user.

So, I still need a simple solution to viewing manually selected files by album thumbnail. Something my customer can deal with, something that any neophyte can do in iTunes. Can you help me with that ? Or someone else ?

Thanks,
Dave

[Daudio]

I ran into another little problem (hope it is little).

I created my new View in the MC 'Audio' Group to inherit the media type filter, but now I want to move it to another Group I created for my customers main tools.

I recall dragging things out of 'Audio' before, and getting a little "Move or Copy" selection widget when dropping them on the destination Group. But my new "Meta Genre" view doesn't do that, instead it starts a new, empty, playlist in the destination. Not what I wanted, or expected !

Can you explain what is wrong and how I may be able to move my new View ?

TIA

[blgentry]

I can handle complexity, but try to live by KISS, and all the more so when I'm working on something for a non-sophisticated user.

You'll get used to MC's expression language pretty quickly.  You are definitely correct that developing and debugging a complex expression is hard.  I'm not great at it, but I do a pretty decent job I think.  My top 2 tips:

1.  Develop your expressions in an external text editor, then cut and paste them into an expression column to test.  Once they work, move them to the field you are working on, or the Customize View area you are working with.
2.  Start small and work up.  Doing MC expressions isn't like writing "real code".  There are no informative error messages.  So if you start with a core and work "outwards" in your constructs, it helps make your development process work more quickly.

So, I still need a simple solution to viewing manually selected files by album thumbnail.

The Playlist View I described in my first post, at the very end, which uses a PANES interface will absolutely group your playlists by album and show album thumbnails.  I can give you more direction if necessary.  Unless that solution completely misses the desires you are expressing?  I think it's a decent solution, if not perfect.

Brian.

[blgentry]

I created my new View in the MC 'Audio' Group to inherit the media type filter, but now I want to move it to another Group I created for my customers main tools.

I recall dragging things out of 'Audio' before, and getting a little "Move or Copy" selection widget when dropping them on the destination Group. But my new "Meta Genre" view doesn't do that, instead it starts a new, empty, playlist in the destination.

Hmm.  I just tested this on my system.  I dragged a custom view out of Audio into another top level group I have called Tools.  It worked as expected.  I got a little music note icon as I hovered over the tools group.  Then when I dropped it, I got the menu to copy or move.  I chose copy and it worked.

Perhaps you can post a screen shot to help us visualize what you are trying to do?

Brian.

[Daudio]

Brian,

re: attached screenshot,

I dragged my new view 'Audio/Meta_Genres' to the Playlist Group 'Playlist/Audiophile Albums' (which I created and populated with some smart, and dumb playlists) to attempt to move the View to a collection of tools in one Group.

Every time I tried, there was never a Move/Copy choice, only the creation of a new black Playlist, that I had to delete.

I also tried to 'move' another new view I created called 'Label Select' that ended up on the root of the Std View Tree, but it acted the same as above, just creating a new playlist.



The Goal is to locate all the custom tools(views, playlists) for my customer in one Group, which should be a no-brainer, but... ??

Any ideas ?

TIA

P.S How does one attach an image to a post on this forum s/w?  I clicked 'Choose File', selected the prepared image from my Desktop, saw the file name to the right of the button in the Attach' section, tried dragging it, played with the 'image' tags, checked the Preview,but could see no way to actually insert it into the bb code .

[blgentry]

I dragged my new view 'Audio/Meta_Genres' to the Playlist Group 'Playlist/Audiophile Albums' (which I created and populated with some smart, and dumb playlists) to attempt to move the View to a collection of tools in one Group.

I can understand your goal in doing this.  Unfortunately, Playlists and Views are entirely different things and, as far as I know, you can't mix Playlists and Views in the same outer container.  So that explains why your drag and drop doesn't work.  You can't drag Views into the Playlists group.

Any ideas ?

Yes.  Use Views for everything that you can.  Or everything that makes sense or is convenient.  Use playlists for the playlist oriented stuff.  Then, make the Panes Playlist View that I've mentioned three times now.  Give it a try and it might serve your needs.  If it does not, then train your customer to go to the correct view or to the Playlists group when necessary. 

You can pare down the outer groups if you'd like.  You can remove Video and Images to make things more neat.  Or you can make more outer groups if that would serve you best.  Note that the outer groups you create will ALL be for views.  You can't create new outer playlist groups.  All playlists go under Playlists.

I'm trying to provide you with as much help as I have time for.  I'm just another JRiver user trying to help someone out.

Good luck!

Brian.

[Daudio]

Brian,

OK, I get that, so I try and make a Playlist Group, the only make Group command I know so far. The new Group appears in the Playlists meta-Group, and won't contain a View.
So I search the wiki for 'view group' and find a little page called 'view scheme group'. I follow the (odd) instructions, only to discover MC22 doesn't work like that - no such Edit command. So Im stuck again...

Every way I want to go seems blockaded   And I no newbie, I started building business apps with databases and development packages back in 1985. Now that segment has evolved to 'Business Intelligence'. I also have 6 years of heavy library building and maint. with iTunes. I have frozen at iTunes 10, since Apple has devolved it into utter garbage with 12.x 

So, I'd still like to put the 2 Views and various Playlists into a better package for my customer, then scattered all around. Two Groups would work. I have already removed a number of stock Tree items (Dr Who ??), that are useless and distracting for this usage.

And I do appreciate your help ! So far you have been the 'face' of JRiver, and gotten me through a few problems and like to study to go further. So I'm happy with you and your help.

Cheers,
Dave

[blgentry]

OK, I get that, so I try and make a Playlist Group, the only make Group command I know so far. The new Group appears in the Playlists meta-Group, and won't contain a View.
So I search the wiki for 'view group' and find a little page called 'view scheme group'. I follow the (odd) instructions, only to discover MC22 doesn't work like that - no such Edit command. So Im stuck again...

I don't follow what you are trying to do.  Are you trying to make a Playlist group within the Playlists outer container?  Just right click on Playlists and select "New playlist group".

I have a guess about what you want, but it's just a guess.

Every way I want to go seems blockaded   And I no newbie, I started building business apps with databases and development packages back in 1985.

You've indicated that before and I get it.  Part of the reason I'm trying extra hard to help you is that MC is a pretty rich application, particularly for someone who has a programming background.  Someone like you.  There are definitely hard limits here and there.  MC is MC.  It's not a general purpose UI or Database development app.  You can still get a LOT done with it.  It's worth continuing with unless your goals are just completely counter to MC's mode of operation.

At the risk of just beating this to death, have you TRIED MY PANES BASED PLAYLIST VIEW?  This might solve some of your issues.

And I do appreciate your help ! So far you have been the 'face' of JRiver, and gotten me through a few problems and like to study to go further. So I'm happy with you and your help.

You're welcome.  I'm happy to help.  Take care and good luck.

Brian.

[Daudio]

"have you TRIED MY PANES BASED PLAYLIST VIEW?"

I'd like to take that question to another thread.

  https://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php/topic,110069.0.html