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[Mr. King]

Greetings!

I'm a long-time iTunes user whom as of late has gotten serious about lossless audio and WASAPI bit-perfect playback. I've spent a great amount of time ripping all my CDs into lossless and I decided with the horrid iTunes 11 release that it was time to look into better alternatives. I've looked at foobar2000, Mediamonkey and JRiver Media Center and found Media Center to be the best solution to all my needs so I've been running the trial for about a week now. After reading wiki articles and setting up Media Center as much as possible I've ran into some "issues" that I can't work out which I'm hoping I can so I can purchase a license ASAP.

1. In Panes view, how do I set it up for artists with The at the beginning of their name and other characters like " and ( to be ignored? I saw there's expressions posted that can do this but it removes the articles not ignores them. I know there's a feature (Ignore articles (a, an, the)) but this applies to albums as well, which I don't wish to do. Any ideas? Is there any possibility for that ignore articles feature to be enhanced with options for artists/albums and add customization articles to be ignored?

2. Also in panes view when I double click on an artist, album or song, it starts playing. However if I look at the bottom of the list it creates a New Artist entry on artists and a New Album entry on albums. It also creates check boxes by each artist/album in the view too. Is there any way to hide all of these from showing? Example screenshot here

3. Is there a way to customize track # column to display the current track number of the remaining tracks of the currently playing album? An example being 03 of 12 or something like that?

4. When you double click on the album art in the bottom left corner it opens the album art (scaled to screen size) in full screen display view mode. Is there any way to change this behavior to instead detach the display and display the album art at the original 1:1 size (only scale if too large for screen size)?

That's all the questions I have for now. I'm hoping there's solutions/workarounds for these things so I can move forward with committing!

Thanks a lot and cheers for this awesome media player!

[MrC]

Howdy first timer.

1. Add an expression column in the pane.  Here's a sample expression to remove leading punctuation and the listed articles (you can add/remove as necessary):

   Regex([Artist], /#^((?:[[:punct:]]|An|Or|The|In|On|Of)\b\s*)?(.+)$#/, 2, 1)

2. The checkboxes allow you to enable/use Panes tagging (aka Tagging Mode).  I don't think you can disable them.

3. Can you clarify this one a bit?

4. You can detach the display and leave it detached.  Subsequent images will appear there.  I don't think there is a re-size display to fit image mode.

[Mr. King]

1. I had to change it from Artist to Album Artist but it seems to be working fine. While it would be nice to filter it without removing the prefixes from the list but I guess that works.

2. Bummer, perhaps something for the to-do list?

3. For track # it just displays the track number. Track # of # shows the current track of the amount of tracks on the album. Say there's 12 tracks. MC displays just single track numbers (e.g. 1) versus the desired example, 1 of 12. iTunes is probably the best example here.

4. But you can't hide it or toggle it. Perhaps something else for the to-do list?

Thanks a lot!

[MrC]

1. Better to generally use Album Artist (auto).

2. Dunno.  JRiver will have to speak to this.

3. Like the attached image?  This requires a little trickery, and I don't want to scare you away...

4. Ctrl-6

[Mr. King]

Yes, like the image! Bring on the trickery!

[MrC]

Ok, you asked for it.

The trick relies on Media Center's stages for preparing a view for presentation: there's the file filtering stage, and the file list stage.  By using Media Center's expression language, we can have MC tally tracks per album, and store those in a user-defined calculated field (or an expression column or category in a view).

I'll have you create a new view, so that you can see how it works entirely in one view.  You can apply this more globally later.  Here are the basic steps:

1. Create a new Panes view under Audio, name it whatever you want.
2. Customize the view's Set rules for file display, click Import/Export and append the following search query:

[=save(0,v_tracks[album artist (auto)][album])1]=1 [=save(math(1+load(v_tracks[album artist (auto)][album])),v_tracks[album artist (auto)][album])1]=1

This is the per artist/album track accumulator.

3. Add a new column in the file list, making it an expression column with the following expression:

   load(v_tracks[album artist (auto)][album])

or as a more formatted:

   [Track #] of load(v_tracks[album artist (auto)][album])

This should now be working when you enter the view.

To apply it more globally, you can apply the search query you set in the Set rules for file display instead to the root Audio group in the tree (and by default all the subordinate views will inherit this rule), so that when you select audio from any Audio view, the counts are already complete.  You can create a user-defined expression field named [# Tracks Album], which you'll first set to type Integer, Relational - one per Album (save the settings, and then re-open the dialog) and then set it to be Calculated, using the formatted expression above.  Then, add this field as a column in the Playing Now playlist view.

It is important to note: this technique relies on MC's new global variables in the expression language, and the results of the calculated field (or view's expression column) require that the Set rules for file display are run once before use.  This means, you need to show the relevant audio view at least once per MC launch before the values will be set.

[Mr. King]

Got it up and working, thanks a lot!

[MrC]

Great.  I added some help links to the Save() function's wiki entry.