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[madom]

Hi

I'd like to set up a Playlist I want to sync to my handheld. Now I wish only to sync full albums, not single songs. Is there a way I can set up a playlist, which doesn't show me each and every song if I click it, but only the artist and the albums?

Like this:

Seq   ¦   Artist   ¦   Album
1           Beck         Odelay
2           Eels          Souljacker
3           Gong        Gazeuse


Thank you for your help
Mario

[IanG]

I don't know of a way - it would be nice if the Album Thumbnail view could be applied to playlists.

Ian G.

[madom]

Absolutely, that would do the trick.

Although I'd also like to see the "Detail View" only with Artist/Album as I suggested in the first posting.

[ForsakenArdor]

madom, I'm not sure if what you want is what I'm thinking of, but if you want a smartlist that plays whole albums only and your non-album or incomplete album songs have no album tag, then simply put this in the blank:
-album=[]

If all or most of your songs have an album tag, MC has a "complete album" thing which I don't think is really part of the ID3 tags, but, from the help file:

Complete Albums
Media Center can automatically display complete and incomplete albums. An album is considered complete if all the files with the same [Album] value in the same directory:
·      are sequentially numbered tracks starting at 1
·      have at least 2 files or 10 minutes of audio
·      are Audio and have a non-empty [Album] value.

If you meet every requirement for the complete album field to be acccurate, which is plenty, use this string:
[complete album]=1

This isn't accurate for me because I have multi-artist albums that aren't in their own exclusive folder, I have a missing track on an album because the same recording was on a previous album and I also sometimes use three digits in the track number field for albums with more than one disc (101, 102, 201, etc.).

You can also manually find what you want by opening the library tree, audio, then click on Artist/Album.  If you haven't altered the view scheme of this screen, then there should be two columns, artist and album, at the top.  First, select the artists you want, then select the albums you want.  Don't know how stupid you are, but in case you don't know, hold down Control to make multiple selections, apologies if you know this.  When you have all the albums you want, right click on the last album you selected, click on send to, playlist, create playlist.  Don't click back in the artist column or the album column will reset.  You can also just highlight all the files or go to edit, select all, drag and drop, etc.

And what IanG said, you CAN apply album thumbnails to playlists.  Just go to your main library screen, right click on the title of one of the columns, list style, album thumbnails.  Now, you don't need to have all of your cover art stored, but I do for most of my albums because it looks nice.  If you don't have the cover, it just shows a blank square with the title underneath.  Highlight which albums you want, right click and send to playlist or drag and drop.

[madom]

Thanks for your suggestions.

I'd like to send only full albums to my handheld and therefore have a playlist, which only displays artists and albums, not songs.

No, you can't have "Album Thumbnail"-view in Playlists. Only "Thumbnail" but then you get a thumb for each song (MC 10).  Are you using MC 11 and mean to say, this works now?

"Complete Album" thing doesn't help, it still displays all the songs on an album.

[IanG]

Are you using MC 11 and mean to say, this works now?

I'm using V11 and don't have album thumbnails as a display option.

Ian G.

[ForsakenArdor]

No, I'm using MC10 still too.  Let me see if I'm understanding you right.  You want to send only full albums to your handheld, so, you need a playlist with all of your full albums.  You can't get a playlist to display only albums and not songs, if that's what you want.  It would sort of defeat the purpose of a playlist if you wouldn't be able to select individual songs.  It would be possible, however, if you ripped each CD as a single file and encoded the entire album as one song, but I'm sure you don't want to waste your time doing that.  But that's the only way for it to look that way in a playlist and I don't understand why it needs to.

There are album thumbnails in the main Media Library (books icon) screen.  I think your best bet is to put '-album=[]' in the search field to filter out songs that have no album tag and to just pick everything out manually.  You can go to view, list style, thumbnail options to make the thumbs smaller so you can see more at a time.  If you don't know where I'm talking about, I've made a couple of screen captures, but they're rather large.  I'll take them down next month.

http://members.aol.com/tigerniteb4xmas/thumbs.gif
http://members.aol.com/tigerniteb4xmas/playlist.gif

The first shows the media library in album thumbnail view and the contents of an album's tracks are shown as a tool tip.  The second has several albums highlighted with all the menus you need to see in order to export them to a playlist.

[madom]

You got me right now, thank you for your explanations (although I already knew all this )

I still plead for an album-only view option for playlists. To maintain large handheld-playlists (I have 40GB) it would be very nice.

[kaiynne]

I understand what you are asking for, and I think I know why you want it.  When i started using media center I wanted something like this, then I realized that it was uneeded for everything except syncing my ipod.  THat was until I came across this thread which makes the task so much easier.

http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=23557.0

make sure you check out my comment in the thread about drag and drop usage.

[kaiynne]

sorry I gave you the wrong link, try this one;

http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=22729.0