Today's tip, short and sweet, is about how to create a view that you can use as an Album Inventory. Although it has been a while since the question has been asked on Interact, it nonetheless comes up fairly often.
One technique that is often suggested is to create a Smartlist from all Audio that includes only Track #1 from Disc #1. This works for most cases, but misses when your albums might be sparse (e.g. missing track #1). Another technique is to include all Audio, and then use the
~limit modifier to include only a single track from an album. This is also fine, but is sometimes difficult for users to understand how to use the ~limit modifier.
So I tend to like to create Views more than simple Lists, especially if the list really belongs in a particular media type such as Audio anyway, and because certain view types have some neat properties.
So let's create the view.
1. Right-click Audio and select Add Library View...
2. Select Albums and change the Name at the bottom to Album Inventory.
3. Select the Album Inventory view from under Audio.
4. In the view tab's pull-down menu, select List Style > Details
5. Right-click the first column header in the view, and both deselect Image (large thumbnail) and select Image (small thumbnail).
6. Right-click and remove the second column which is Stack Icon.
7. Narrow the Image (small thumbnail) column so that it fits better.
8. Add any additional columns you want in your inventory; arrange the columns the way you want.
Now, you can select all the albums in the list and Edit > Copy. The contents of those rows are now on the clipboard in a spreadsheet-friendly (Tab Separated Values) format. Paste it into a spreadsheet for print out or conversion to PDF.
What's nice about this view is you can change the List Style quickly with Ctrl-U, cycling through a useful Thumbnail view and an inventory Details view, so the view isn't a one-trick pony.
Notice how certain fields are automatically summed (Track #, Duration) or averaged (Bitrate). This is one of those neat properties that comes for free with a Categories view.
Of course you could create similar views for other media types as well, or even create one Uber Media Inventory view that lives at the root of the tree and includes all media types (which could be selectable via a category, or Search).
From
last week's tip, you'll notice that the Name category here takes on the current categories identity, which we know here to be Album. If that's confusing to you, you can change the column by selecting Album instead.
Next week I'm going to post in the MC19 forum (unless I can convince JRiver to create a new board for User Tips and Techniques).
Have a great week!
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Topic: • MrC's Tip of the Week 2013.34: Album Inventory View (Read 9994 times)