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[Daudio]

Brian said:  “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.”

“have you TRIED MY PANES BASED PLAYLIST VIEW?”

I did, sort off 

I have been trying this and seeing how that works towards what I want to achieve, and not grokking your instructions completely at first, but reading and also picking up bits here and there through the swiss cheese of the wiki 

Here is my first custom View. I would have captured the Customize View Window in the same screenshot, but the #^&*! MC window z-index ‘handling’ vanished the sucker as soon as app focus shifted to ‘Grab’ to activate the capture…


View #1 - Meta_Genre:
Based on the Audio/Genres View. View As - Categories, Tree Selection, Tree Browsing, inherit Media Type.
I replaced the 1st Selection, [Genre] with a new field [Meta_Genre] that I defined in an expression, and left the rest pretty much alone. The point of the expression is to collapse the many tag Genre values, into a limited number of related types of music. With some debugging the expression did its job and you can see the result below. I like that the compilation albums are aggregated separately ! It’s OK that one can click down to an artist and their albums track list; to play, tag, or whatever Not a bad general browser 

——
View #2 - Label Select
Created New View from nowhere . View As - Categories, Tree Selection, Tree Browsing, inherit Media Type (I guess).
I’m not sure which template I choose, but I had read about a View that had multiple filter rule sets that could be chosen by the user. So I choose the ‘Search List’ selector widget, and populated it with the simple selection rules I had already done in the simple Smart Playlists, from the originals in iTunes. Except, of course for one which requires ‘OR’ logic, which seems to be beyond the capabilities of the Rules Editor (another thread…) !! (Never mind ! got that working - no doc that says that the paren's enclose ORed rules, where outside it's all AND's, in the Rules Editor)

I’m not as thrilled with the result set presentation. It is the stacked horizontal bars of Album art and short file list. At least one can drill down to a specific music file to interact, but it wastes space and requires a lot of scrolling, instead of glancing and grokking for an album, and drilling down again.

It was all to easy for me to end up with a grid of artwork thumbnails, which was great for scanning quickly, but was ultimately crippled in not allowing access to the track lists for interaction 

The biggest take away from this little description is that after all this study and experimentation, I have no idea what determines how the data is presented in the final ‘stages’ (bottom segment) of the View window. Which, I’m sure you’ll agree, can be frustrating when one has  an idea they want to implement.  And I’ve been getting anxiety from the customer - he wants delivery now ! Well, next Tuesday actually    But this is not about him. I want to do this now, for me, the challenge, or whatever… I thought I’d left this stuff behind when I retired, but I guess it hasn’t left me

So maybe you can clue me in a bit more given this foundation ?  Do I still need to make a Panes based View ? I guess it just seems like different ways to drill down to a group of tracks with 3 selection filters. Am I wrong ?

Anyone else care to pipe up ? Happy to have you aboard 

Thanks,
Dave

[Daudio]

Oops, forgot the one I did that was actually 'Panes'  I guess I forgot because it turned into kind of a dead end.

View #3 - Audiophile Selections:
Based on ??. View As - Panes, Tree Selection, inherit Media Type.
Here I choose the 'Playlist Group' and selected one I'd created to hold my two manual Playlists, containing hand selected albums. I would have captured the P Group and its Playlists in the screenshot, But the tree refuses to expand 'Audio' and 'Playlists' at the same time 

This results in a selection between the two playlists up top, and for the bottom section, I can choose the 'Album Thumbnail' for List Style, but the thumbnails are static, and won't drill down to tracks and interactivity. Basically, pretty, but useless 

So that's all I got out of 'Panes', did I miss something ?

Dave


P.S.  MC22 crashed twice while composing this post. No Sync or anything, just playing some tracks thru the Mac Mini's speaker. Looks to have Quit after finishing playing a track. This is not good...

[blgentry]

This results in a selection between the two playlists up top, and for the bottom section, I can choose the 'Album Thumbnail' for List Style, but the thumbnails are static, and won't drill down to tracks and interactivity. Basically, pretty, but useless 

Well, I use this view for a specific purpose.  I like to make large playlists that contain whole albums, not just individual songs.  So I use a Panes Playlist View to audit my playlists that I build, so I can see, at a glace, which albums are in that playlist.  With some slightly more advanced techniques you can also add and remove albums from this type of view. But this isn't what you want.

Did you try changing list style to Details?  That gives an album cover per album, with all tracks listed right beside it.  That might work for you; that was my intention all along.  But I'm now seeing that you are expecting something different.  See my next post for a different idea.

Brian.

[blgentry]

Ok, so I did some playing around and I came up with a way of doing what I think it is you want.  Namely that you want Playlists to display just like the Albums view, where you can see the album covers and then drill down into the album and see it's contents.

To do this, I created a new outer group called PL Views.  Then I copied my main Albums view into it.  Finally, I did Customize View on this newly created Albums view and set Files to Include.  In this dialog you can select any MC field and give conditions.  I chose [Playlists] and then ticked the box next to the Playlist name I wanted to include.  After pressing OK, my new view now shows only albums from my Playlist and it shows them just like the albums view.

But my view was still named "Albums".  So I renamed it to match the Playlist name.  Then I copied it (by dragging it to the title of the outer group and selecting copy) and did the same thing again:  I did customize view on it and set files to include to a *different* playlist.  Then changed it's name to match that playlist.  I did 3 of these and now have Album style views for 3 of my playlists.

This is certainly not automatic, but if you have a reasonable number of playlists, it shouldn't be very much work to create these individual Album style playlist views.  I'm attaching a couple of pictures as an example.

Hopefully this is closer to what you are looking for.

Brian.

[blgentry]

...and by the way, if it's not obvious:  Because these are Views, you can put other views into this same container with the "album based playlist views".  You can also make sub-containers inside the outer container.  Look at the picture attached here for a simple illustration of both of these concepts.

Brian.

[Daudio]

Brian

I was busy yesterday with non-computer stuff, and in a little while today, I need to take this music server Mini down for hardware upgrades.

"To do this, I created a new outer group called PL Views. "

Great, but HOW, exactly do you create a new 'outer' Group ??  (anybody !)

The only thing I could find in the wiki about a View Group is wrong or obsolete 

I would like to consolidate all my new views and test work in a new tree/View Group, in addition to the custom Playlist Group. Then I can do some refinement tomorrow..

Thanks, getting there...
Dave

[blgentry]

Great, but HOW, exactly do you create a new 'outer' Group ??  (anybody !)

Outer groups and really just Views like any other view.  Do Add Library View.  In the dialog that comes up, look at the bottom for name and Location.  Select (root) for Location.  Now this View will be on the top level with Audio, Video, etc.  Choose a name and choose some kind of type.  The Type really isn't important since it's just going to be a container.

Hopefully this plus my last post will get you going in the direction you want.

Brian.

[Daudio]

Brian,  Big thanks for the timely reply !

I created the Group as you said, and moved all my custom Views to it, great !

I'd also thought I'd do a similar thing with my custom Playlists, but they only show up in [root]/Playlists/  along with all the stock stuff, and Playlists won't drop into a Views container. I'm trying to simplify things for my customer so he only has to deal with the two, custom, root level groups (one would be better, but have to have one for Views and one for Playlists).

Is there a way to create another Playlist container, like "My Playlists" group ?


Dave

[blgentry]

As I've said before, I'm pretty sure that Playlists are "stuck" in the Playlists container and you can't make more containers or move them anywhere else.

But what about my Playlist as an Album View that I showed you above?  Isn't that what you want anyway?  Playlists that show up as album covers that you can drill down into?

Brian.

[Daudio]

Brian,

Ok, but too bad, on the Playlist Group thing. Have to live with it. I'll look at you other idea tomorrow...

I was updating the tags for a small folder of DSD files I had forgotten about, most were empty but for the filename, and I worked for about an hour finding that data and images on the Net from scraps... I was almost done, and had pasted the 2nd art image from the clipboard vs. 'Get from Internet', when MC threw a bunch of tagging errors, and I discovered that the clipboard image did not go to the selected file, but overwrote the correct images for 6 other files, as well as nulling out a bunch of other random fields I had labored to find and fill !! ?!%$^^#%

I would love to curse MC up one-side and down-another, but I don't have time, and it might not be taken well...

But this thing has cost me a lot of unnecessary time and anxiety  (

Shutting the system down now for major surgry...

Talk later,
Dave

[Daudio]

Brian,

Hi, happy Monday !

Surgery went fine, everything up and running, and I had a chance to try out your idea.

Followed your instructions pretty well this time as I getting used to the fractured lingo  I did have one little hiccup:

"I did Customize View... and set Files to Include"  There's no exact "Files to Include" text on the MC22 Customize View interface, so I was searching all over the place looking for the literal next, and worrying what's wrong, till I combined two different text labels into something close to the target text, to find what you were referring to. One might complain that is a small point, but it is indicative of the inconsistent and confused terminology in the wiki, and forum posts, old and new. I only mention this to point out one of the main difficulties I have faced in trying to learn parts of MC  (end of rant )

So I made two of this kind of view, one for each manual Playlist, since if I filtered for both Playlists in the View - Settings -Rules editor, all the albums/files were combined into one set.

Once they were defined, named, etc. I played around with the interactive display controls, and discovered that I could get the albums grouped and displayed with the art work to the left and track listing to the right. This allows interaction with individual files, bur wastes a lot of space and demands lots of scrolling, albeit filling the specs, but poorly. OTOH I could get the albums displayed by 'Album Thumbnail' which was very space efficient, and what I wanted, except it was fatally flawed in not allowing drill-down to tracks.

But I ended up leaving the 2 Views in place, as glorified alias's for the manual Playlist, which are still necessary to drop files into, as one thinks necessary. 

I've attached a screen shot of one of these 'Interactive playlist Alais' Views to show you how it looks.  Thanks for the procedure

The same picture also shows the new root level, customer oriented, menu I had in mind. I would have showed the custom Playlist setup too, but I hadn't yet found the cryptic little control for (?) auto tree expansion, in another learning excursion through 'Tools/Options...', and Tree display was impossible to control (still not in total control).

Thanks again for your help in achieving these custom Views.

Cheers,
Dave

[Daudio]

Here's a 2nd screenshot to show my playlists (don't need the Audiophile Albums' group any more - replaced by the following).

The main point here is the Label/Format View  to give my customer quick, browsable access to certain types of recordings. I was happy with individual playlists, but that won't work with drill down in MC, and it does look pretty good up top 

Some of these queries are dependent on manual data entry, at rip-time, into the 'Album' or 'Comment' tags (real tags, so the data is portable).

I lament the lack of Record Label data in the state of digital music meta data today. It looks like digital music file meta-data is forever frozen in the MP3 era.

Cheers, all
Dave

[blgentry]

"I did Customize View... and set Files to Include"  There's no exact "Files to Include" text on the MC22 Customize View interface, so I was searching all over the place looking for the literal next, and worrying what's wrong, till I combined two different text labels into something close to the target text, to find what you were referring to. One might complain that is a small point, but it is indicative of the inconsistent and confused terminology in the wiki, and forum posts, old and new.

You can blame this one on me.  I'm normally extremely specific, even to the point of giving the exact paths to the controls and sections that I'm describing.  But I got lazy in this post as I had so much to type and so much time spent in coming up with the config, testing it, and then making screen shots to attach.  I'm normally better than that.  Glad you found the path yourself though. 

Once they were defined, named, etc. I played around with the interactive display controls, and discovered that I could get the albums grouped and displayed with the art work to the left and track listing to the right.

Hmm.  That sounds like a files based view.  I used the Albums view as a template for these and it displays EXACTLY like the Albums view does.  See below.

OTOH I could get the albums displayed by 'Album Thumbnail' which was very space efficient, and what I wanted, except it was fatally flawed in not allowing drill-down to tracks.

That doesn't make sense.  The Albums view allows drill down; that's why I chose it.  Your screen shot shows exactly what my Playlists Album Style View does.  Is your screen shot of one of your Playlist views or something else?

But I ended up leaving the 2 Views in place, as glorified alias's for the manual Playlist, which are still necessary to drop files into, as one thinks necessary.

Note that you do not have to use drag and drop to add files or albums to a playlist.  If you highlight what you want to add, then right click > send to > Playlist > playlist name , it will add directly to the playlist.  Bonus:  Now that you've done that, this action is now at the top of the right click menu, so you can do it again with just a single click!  Bonus bonus:  You can set the number of these "remembered recent actions" to more than one.  Tools > Options > Tree & View > Advanced > Right click recent command count > (set number here)

You seem like you're happy with what you've got which is great.

Take care,

Brian.

[Daudio]

Brian,

Don't know, I followed your instructions exactly. My 2 new 'Alais' Views (as seen 2 posts back) still have the [Album] field in the left side of the Customize Views box, just like 'Audio/Albums', that I copied.

The screen shot showed the List Style of 'Thumbnail, up top, and 'Details' below. Any other Style on the bottom half, results in something not really useful.

No worries, it is good enough for now.

Contextual menu tips noted !

dave