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[sbsp2]

?

I choose the 'Stacks' option and it's usually greyed-out (disabled/invisible).  I selected a few tracks and tried it but I didn't notice any difference.  Is this a visual thing (at all)?  What is this feature called 'Stacks'?

[JimH]

There is a thread on this around here somewhere.  Did you try image files?

[JimH]

Here it is:
http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=45118.0

[KingSparta]

I Found This Option The Other Day, But After Reading The Help Page For It I Still Was Scratching My head.

To me A "Stack" Is A List Of Events That Have Not Been Executed Yet.

[DarkPenguin]

There is a help page for it?

[KingSparta]

Well, In The Help File There Is A Ref "Show Stacks"

Like Below, And In View The Content, And Browse Library...

I Am Not Sure If It Is The Same Thing However.

Browse Library (Tiles)
When selecting Audio, Images or Video in the organization tree, the display pane to the right displays your collection in panes (columns) or tiles. 

1.   To display tiles, select any item other than "pane" in the display pane drop-down menu. The result is one tile (folder) for each Artist, or Album, or Event, depending on the selected menu item.  The following are customizations available in the drop-down menu:

·      Tiles can be viewed as a thumbnail or in a list format (select Details or Thumbnails).

·      Select Sort to sort the tiles in a variety of ways.

·      The tiles can be viewed as 'stacks', which places the thumbnail onto a 'stack' of other thumbnails. Select Options > Show Stacks.

·      Save the view by selecting View Layout > Save Current Layout.

2.   To view the alphabet for quicker browsing, open the display pane drop-down menu (item #1 in the picture), select Options > Show Alphabet.

3.   To resize the tiles (thumbnails), use the slider.

4.   To modify the way the bottom display pane shows the results of a selection in the upper pane, use the drop-down menu in the bottom pane.

5.   If the bottom list is not displayed, the horizontal splitter bar may be at the bottom of the screen, hiding the list pane.

[Matt]

It's not the same thing as that help link.

Stacks let's you nicely keep multiple versions or formats of a file.

I'll wait for Dark Penguin to explain in more detail.

[Doof]

I think the easiest thing for me to understand was imagine you've taken 20 pictures of your cat sleeping, which I've actually done on numerous occasions. Rather than see all 20 of those images which are pretty much all the same thing, you can stack them so that they show up as just one thumbnail. And you can choose which image is on top, so you can pick the one you think is the best and set it as the top image of the stack. The rest of the stack is pretty much all the same picture anyway, so ordinarily you don't need to see them all, but sometimes it's nice to have them all. This gives you a way to keep all of them, but not let them all clutter your view schemes up.

There's apparently also ways to manage the entire stack as a single entity, rather than having to highlight all of the individual images to manage. But I haven't tried that out yet.

Another application might be to have a stack that consists of a lossy and a lossless version of the same song. You can manage both without having to highlight both, your library only shows the topmost (lossless) version, but when you need the lossy version, like for a portable mp3 player, it's already there.

[DarkPenguin]

The audio thing is slowly being added.  Coming to a version near you is the ability to select "use stack entry" for audio files.  So if you have ape files in a stack with MP3 files and you have that option selected we'll grab the mp3's rather than converting the ape file.  We also have the ability to convert and then stack.  So we convert the ape file, copy the converted mp3 along side the ape file and stack it with that ape file.  You then have everything in your library.  If you have collapsed stacks you'll never see the mp3 files but they'll be available for transfer to handheld.

The idea is that this should eventually replace the hand held cache.

Stacks can also be treated as one entity when futzing with the tags.  If stacks are collapsed and you tag the top file we will set those tags in all the stack files.

I'll probably add this to the RAW file support.  So if you shoot RAW + Jpeg we should be able to pick up the jpeg and display that instead of the RAW file.  (Way quicker.)

I've a ton of ideas relating to this.  Slowly sorting out which ones are appropriate and how to implement those.

It would be easier if we didn't already have some kind of album cover stack thing going on.  Need a new name for one of the two stacks.

Maybe we could call them Flacjacks and go with the pancake paradigm.

[ADDiCT]

DarkPenguin, thank you very much for the explanation! I was looking at the "stacks" post(s) quickly, but didn't quite understand what was going on, so i lost interest in the topic.

I'd say it's crucial to rename one of the two functionalities you were explaining. If i got that right, we have two basic functions:

1. Combination of single "files" (tracks/images/videos/etc.) into one "stack", mainly for viewing purposes (choosing the "best" of the files as the one visible on top of the stack, etc.)
2. Grouping of similar or identical files, mainly for organizational purposes. Tags would apply to all files in that group, etc.

I'd say that "stack" is a logical choice of wording for #1, as the metaphor is easy to grasp and understand (a stack of media files). But #2 is completely different in functionality, IMO. I'd prefer having this called a "group" or a "set".

I have to say that i'm quite excited about #2 especially. In my collection, i have multiple versions of the same audio track (song), for example - on a sampler, on an album, on a single. Right now, i'm using a special tag (which i've called "dupe") to identify a "master" file (where the "dupe" tag would be "1"), and the "slave" files (where the "dupe" tag would be "2"). This approach is only a workaround, of course - i have to keep the tags in sync manually, for example. This is very time-consuming and frustrating, especially for a large collection. The possibility to group several files together to one logical entity would be a major enhancement of MC's media management functionality, IMO.

P.S.: i hope you were only joking when you wrote you'd call one of the functions "Flacjacks". I'm a fan of the "KISS", and the "Form follows function" principles, so i'd prefer a term (or terms) that can be understood (more or less) intuitively. As you can see, even the relatively simple term "stack" is not easily understood.