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[vbrook]

Hi,

Firstly, thanks for an excellent player. I'm a new user, and I'm enjoying the program. I have been reading through the Wiki, manual and posts quite rigioursly over the past couple of weeks. They've been extremely helpful. However, there is one issue I still can't quite get my head round: sorting in album thumbnail view.

Consider two scenarios:

1) A "Summer of 2004" mix tape. Each track is labeled with a different artist, title and album; the tracks are either FLAC or MP3.
2) A "Jimi Hendrix" tribute album: Each track has a different artist(s).

What I would like to do is

A) See (stacked) album covers by 'artist', sorted so that I would find "Fun Mixes: Summer of 2004" under "F" and the Hendrix tribute album under "J" for Jimi Hendrix.

B) In a full display of albums (non-stacked), I would also like the textual labels underneath the thumbnail of my mix tape to show "Fun Mixes: Summer of 2004".

To accomplish this, I have tagged my files with a "band" field, and, redundantly (to cover my bases), a matching "albumartist" field. In my examples above, these fields would correspond to "Fun Mixes: Summer of 2004 Mix" and "Jimi Hendrix". I hope I'm explaining this correctly. Logically, everything works out (I think).

My question is, how do I sort by either albumartist or band in the thumbnails view and get the textual labels as I want them?

There is an "album artist (auto)" that I read about, and it's sort of deciding things for me (and I don't like its decisions!). Perhaps I could turn it off and replace it with either my "albumartist" or "band" tag?

Cheers for any advice!

Vbrook

[park]

I'm not sure what you mean by "stacked". In MC there is a way of stacking files to hide the ones you dont want to see. I'm pretty sure you mean something else, but I'm not sure what.

Pretty much everything you want to accomplish can be done with the viewscheme properties (right click on the view scheme and then click on "edit viewscheme"), the sorting menu (click on the "panes" link at the top of a viewscheme to show a menu which includes a "Sort" submenu), and the "Customize current view" (in the same menu).

To change the sorting to sort by band, open the sort menu, and then click on the "add" button to add [band], and move it to the top.

To change what info you see under thumbnails, go to "customize current view" and there is an area where you can choose which fields get displayed. So, "[Band] - [Album]" would show "Jimi Hendrix - Jimi Hendrix Tribute Album" for your Hendrix one.

Album artist auto, displays the artist name by default, unless you have input a value into the "Album Artist" field, in which case it will display the album artist.
I generally use "Album artist (auto)" in all of my viewschemes and sorting presets, for all my multi-artist albums and soundtracks. It is better than your solution of using "band" because if you actually try to sort your list by "band" you'll have to make sure that every album has an entry in the "band" field for the list to sort correctly. That means a lot of tagging work for you.
However, with Album artist auto, it automatically populates itself with the artist, so to override it, you only have to add a value to the "album artist" field for the albums with multiple artists and in my case, soundtracks. Much less tagging work. Then, when you sort or filter by "Album artist (auto)" it always sorts or filters by the artist you want it to.

[vbrook]

Cheers for the reply. By "stacked", I mean that I see a pile of several album covers corresponding to an artist.

I did add the sort, and it works. The labeling, however, does not: With "band" some labels appear, and some do not. With "albumartist", the labels all show up as [albumartist] (i.e. it is not recognised). These fields (exactly as I've typed them here) most definitely exist in my files, and the data in them is correct.

Perhaps I am not understanding something fundamental. The story of tags, as I've pieced it together, is this:

Each music file can hold information about the music it contains, and this information is structured in "fields". Some fields are pre-labeled; specifically which ones they are depends on the codec, but some are, by design, common between different codecs (e.g. "title"); the rest of the fields can be labeled by the user. Some codecs have code-names for fields, e.g. in MP3 "TPE2" corresponds to "band". On top of that, music programs sometimes display these labels in their own way. So, there is a large margin for error when the user is sorting, viewing, and labeling/"tagging" their music. Is that right? I'm quick to learn but have no technical background.

About my labeling problem:

-Is "Album Artist" as it appears in Media Center the same as "albumartist" as it might appear in other programs? Or, is "Album Artist" different from "albumartist"? Perhaps Media Center is getting confused somehow. But then, "band" should work OK, and it does not.

-Does Media Center's display behaviour vary by codec, even though the specific field names are consistent across the different codecs?

-Can user-defined fields trip up a program? In my music files, "albumartist" is a user-defined field in MP3s but is native to FLAC; "band" is native to MP3 but is 'user-defined' in FLAC.

With respect to tagging, I would rather have one, primary column that contains the information I want. Therefore, I don't mind redundantly tagging for albumartist/band in all of my files. I can do it as a batch job and it takes two seconds.

No offense to anyone, but the whole system of tagging is horribly short-sighted, and it underscores how it important it is to get a categorisation system correct from the start. That said, I am glad I found Media Centre, which seems to be absolutely tops in terms of sorting through the mess. I might even be able to tag the remaining 70% of my music collection that is classical music, one day. Previous to finding Media Center, I had given up hope!

Many thanks again!

Cheers,
VBrook

[vbrook]

Hi there...

A bit more that I've discovered, maybe it will help.

I exported all fields to an HTML table and opened it in Excel. My tag "albumartist" appears nowhere. The "band" tag does appear for for some of the files, but it does not appear for WMA files. Other applications do see the WMA tags. However, Windows Explorer properties tells me that the WMA files have no tag information at all, which is incorrect. So, perhaps there is some WMA problem.

My "albumartist" tag however is not even noticed by Media Center. Perhaps I have not configured correctly, but I believe I have.

V

[vbrook]

I've tried in several different ways (took the day off), but I still cannot get my [albumartist] tags to display. Moreover, I have a [discnumber] tag, and I cannot get it to display. MC doesn't see either of the tags.

Any advice?

I went to "Customize View" and I added my own expression columns for [albumartist] and [discnumber].

[eba]

Each music file can hold information about the music it contains, and this information is structured in "fields". Some fields are pre-labeled; specifically which ones they are depends on the codec, but some are, by design, common between different codecs (e.g. "title"); the rest of the fields can be labeled by the user. Some codecs have code-names for fields, e.g. in MP3 "TPE2" corresponds to "band". On top of that, music programs sometimes display these labels in their own way. So, there is a large margin for error when the user is sorting, viewing, and labeling/"tagging" their music. Is that right? I'm quick to learn but have no technical background.

About my labeling problem:

-Is "Album Artist" as it appears in Media Center the same as "albumartist" as it might appear in other programs? Or, is "Album Artist" different from "albumartist"? Perhaps Media Center is getting confused somehow. But then, "band" should work OK, and it does not.

I think most programs use the band field to store albumartist (certainly Windows Media Player does), which MC doesn't

MC's album artist system works very well once you understand how it works - basically:

If Album Artist is blank and all files within the folder are by the same artist, Album Artist (auto) = Artist
If Album Artist is not blank, Album Artist (auto) = Album Artist
If Album Artist is blank, and files within the folder are by different artists, Album Artist (auto) = (Multiple Artists)

If you try to edit Album Artist (auto) it will automatically edit Artist or Album Artist.
Take a look at this thread for more info:
http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=33255.0

Hope that helps