On friend's JRiver system trying to set up his comic books in MC26.
Full disclosure: I don't know anything about comics at all (besides Batman & Superman), so forgive me if I use the wrong terminology.
By default, importing comic books is a Media Type of Data. I've tried a few different Media Sub Types. I created a new top-level media category (View) called Comics using the Empty View preset. It appears between Video and Television. For the View's Rules, I kept it as simple as I could. I made one rule for now, "File Type is .cbz" in order to appear in my new category Comics. Nice and easy.
I imported a series of comics called "DMZ". His files were named "DMZ #001.cbz" through "DMZ #072.cbz". He wanted to have them grouped together by Series "DMZ" and then internally grouped by Year. I believed that would be a piece of cake. It would be like a TV Show series which is grouped by the Series name "Seinfeld" and then once inside Seinfeld, it would be grouped by Season. Each Season would have individual episodes ordered numerically. In this case, I'd be using Year instead of Season.
The problem I'm having is "Series" is not available to me as a Column Heading like it is for Movies or TV Shows. I could use any Column Heading I want and treat it like I would a proper Series heading, but that's stupid. I'm assuming it's because I have a Media Type of "Data", but that's just an assumption at this point. Why would "Data" need to be grouped by Series, I suppose is the theory. Since "Series" is not available to me neither is "Series Description". I didn't know this, but Spiderman, for instance, has several different comic book series. I always thought Spiderman was Spiderman, but apparently not.
So, I tried one more thing. I blanked out the fields Media Type and Media Sub Type for the comic book files. Suddenly, I had access to Series and Series Description! I left Media Type blank and made Media Sub Type "Book" and all was well. This will be an acceptable workaround for now. I think I kept those two Column Headings hidden on his system anyway. Where do we go from here? Should .cbz, .cbr, .epub & .mobi files be imported to JRiver as "Data" for a Media Type? It seems that "Data" populating the Media Type field is what caused this issue for me in the first place. Wouldn't it be possible to make Media Type "Data" have access to Series & Series Description Column Headings when looking at Comic Books (or any type of book) with a List View of Details? Are there other Column Headings that become inaccessible that might be useful/needed when adding books & comics to JRiver?
A final lesson I learned is...Comic book nerds take their comic books very seriously. LOL When I told my friend I might not be able to give him the column headings Series and Series Description, he let out a 5-second sigh that produced hurricane-force winds. LOL
