I am struggling with the views though. Q1 Is there a tutorial or extended decription as I haven't been able to find one yet?
I posted one
here for v13 (much of this is still valid today) and another
here for v17. They may help.
Here is an example of one of my 'struggles' I am in a category view for Artists. I drill down for, say, Barber. I get 4 nice thumbs in Album order - just what I want. Below the split I get the 4 album details. Q2 how do I switch the lower display off - I would like to default to no details.
When in a category based view, and arriving at the last level of the view, if there is just a single line of thumbs the lower "details" view opens automatically. This behaviour is not configurable. You can close the file list though, either by double clicking on one of the thumbs above, or look in the details list header, over on the right hand side, there should be a "Close" entry, and clicking that, erm, closes the list.
So Q3 is really How do I change the order and retain the 'nice Album header'?
Try hovering the mouse over the tab name for a second or two until the "View Header Menu" appears, then choose "Group By > More (sort groups a-z) > Album"
This will only give you the album name in the header, no dates and no artist names, so you might find this header to be "not so nice"
You may have noticed that the "Group By > More >" lists allow you to apply grouping based on any field that you have in your library, and remember, we can create are own custom library fields. Many of us have created fields specifically to be used for grouping the lists in the order we desire. If you need any more help with this concept, just ask.
-marko