I’m sure it’s a longstanding bug
. In my “Album” view, I see thumbnails and below each thumbnail the text of its “album” tag. The view is sorted in the usual IT alpha sort on those tags—that is, special characters (“, #, etc.) first, then numerals starting with 1, 1x, 1xx, 1xxx, etc., then alpha A-Z. So the sort order is fine (and there’s a little icon up top that shows “A-Z” with a down arrow). I don’t know how to change that; when I tap or hold the icon nothing happens. The problem is that when I tap one of the the letters in the vertical A-Z index list, it jumps back to the beginning of the display except for a few apparently random (although repeatable, at least) letters that act as real index points, the way an HTML anchor tag jumps to a specific point in a web page/file. It looks as though it’s designed to let you jump to the album tags (and associated thumbnails) that begin with the selected index letter. With a very large library, this is invaluable. Otherwise one must pick the closest working index point and then swipe and swipe and swipe (at least the flywheel effect helps) to reach the vicinity of the desired album or group of albums.
Search is not always helpful here because, for example, album names (even for those I’ve tagged myself) may not always contain a consistent query term. For instance, I have the complete Rubinstein Chopin set (something like 11 discs) but the album title (I didn’t tag it) begins with “A” for “Artur Rubinstein: The Chopin Collection.” So to compare his performance of the waltzes with that of Lipatti or recent contenders, most of whom have album tags that begin “Chopin:”, I have to swipe all the way back and forth through hundreds of albums by Bruch, Brahms, Beethoven, Bach, etc. This is seriously time consuming and frustrating due to the limited reliable duration of musical (echoic) memory. For a reviewer a significant drawback. If I search on “Chopin waltz” I may get results that include both, but tapping the album of interest from the results list yields a view that does not allow me to access the “metadata” (tag info) the way I can from Album view using the “i” icon beside each track. Most of my classical albums have distinct tags for “name” (movement designation/tempo marking, song title, opus number within a set, etc.) and “composition” (work title, opus number for set, etc.) which is just basic data hygiene, so not all relevant information to identify the track is visible in the name field alone.
So a second request, if it ever became possible, would be a way to link from the display resulting from selecting an album from a search results list (is that the “now playing” view?) back to the display resulting from selecting a specific album from the Album view. If there’s a way to do that now, I’d love to know.
But first things first. Given that the alpha index list seemingly works for some letters, I would think that either it should be possible to find and correct why it doesn’t work for others, or, if the current behavior is not in fact using the first letter of the album tag but by coincidence happens to land on it for a few freakish examples, that constructing an index that moves the display to the first tag beginning with the relevant letter should not be super difficult, since the sort order is already correctly displayed.
(Not sure if it matters, but I’m using this on a tablet (iPad Air II) to control MC on a Mac mini server fed from a hardwired NAS, feeding an outboard DAC and analog amplification.)
