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[6233638]

I spent some time today trying to get to the root of a couple of problems Iʼve been having with my library.
 
The first issue I have is that if you simply group by album—the “special” album grouping, that is—the results are a mess if you have more than one version of the same album.
If you have more than one version of an album, all the tracks get grouped together, which is not particularly helpful:


 
When I have more than one version of an album, I have been tagging these files using the [Description] field, as that seemed like the most appropriate place.
I have a custom field set up which displays the Album name, the description if it has one, and whether itʼs a multichannel album or not—SACDs often have both.
 

 
Now thatʼs a lot better, but the groups are still not being sorted correctly—I would like to have them sorted by the number of channels.
The bigger issue that this introduces, is that all albums by an artist are now being sorted alphabetically rather than being sorted by year.
The “special” album grouping does this, but I canʼt see any way to do this without putting [Year] at the front of my custom field, which I would really prefer not to do.
 
There are a couple of solutions I can think of for this problem.
 

• The “special” album group is updated to support album variations, whether that is through the use of [Description] or another field, and the number of channels is also taken into account as an album variation.
• A more global and useful solution would be the ability to sort groups, similar to the way we can sort items inside groups. That way you can just have a list of [Year],[Album],[Channels] etc. that you want them sorted by.

 
One thing I will point out is that I specifically only have “normal” albums or “multichannel” albums in my grouping, as some albums in my library (compilations) have a mixture of mono and stereo tracks, so you donʼt want to be grouping by a specific number of channels, only ≤2 and >2.
 
 
 
The other problem I have been having is that albums do not play in the order they are displayed.
When I clicked the “play” button on an artist in this view, the albums would play from newest to oldest—the opposite of what I wanted.
 
It did not seem to matter how my items were being grouped and sorted, and when I double-clicked the artist to go down to the album view, they were being sorted correctly.
Eventually I found that the only way to change the order they were being played in was to change the files view from “Details” to “Album Thumbnails” and change the sort order there.
 
This seemed needlessly confusing and took a while to track down. Is there a reason Media Center does not simply play in the order that files are displayed?

[glynor]

I agree with you that Grouping is a disaster (particularly in regards to sorting).  The base cause is that "Groups" aren't really part of the file listing.  They are essentially the same thing as Panes or Categories, but displayed in the File Listing area.  That leads to confusing things like the play order not matching the visible order.

I don't use Grouping for primarily this reason (even though it would be nice to use it more), except for in a few distinct circumstances where it happens to work perfectly.  We've discussed this before.

One tip, though, that can solve this:

The bigger issue that this introduces, is that all albums by an artist are now being sorted alphabetically rather than being sorted by year.
The “special” album grouping does this, but I canʼt see any way to do this without putting [Year] at the front of my custom field, which I would really prefer not to do.

MrC is a clever boy and discovered that you can "hack around" this by using invisible fonts:
http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=84869.msg580510#msg580510

[6233638]

MrC is a clever boy and discovered that you can "hack around" this by using invisible fonts:
http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=84869.msg580510#msg580510

That's a neat trick! Things are looking much better now.
 
There's a couple of other things I'd like to take care of, if anyone has any ideas:

1. Sorting is much better now that I have hidden [Year] and [Channels] in front of the album name.
Any idea what could be done about the order of bonus discs?
 

 
 
2. Any idea how to only list multichannel albums if it's the only version of that album?
In most cases the multichannel albums are from an SACD I've ripped that has both multichannel and stereo layers.
 
However, it's possible to have an album which is only multichannel, so I don't want to exclude all multichannel albums from this library view.

[6233638]

OK, I think I have this sorted now:

Code: [Select]

<font size="10" alpha="0" color="ffffff">[Year] formatdate([Date (Release),0],yyyyMMdd) [Disc #] [Channels]<//font>Delimit([Year],/]/ ,/[)[Album]Delimit([Description],/),/ /()
I'd prefer the year to be displayed over on the right like the "special" Album field, but at least things are grouped and sorted correctly now, though I still haven't figured out a way to exclude multichannel albums only when a stereo version exists.
 
 
You mentioned that it did not shift headers over to the right in your post, but that's not the case for me. Is that something that has changed over time?
 

I'm a little surprised it doesn't make those headers above the thumbs shift over to the right...

[Vocalpoint]

Cool thread.

Can I ask how you are getting your custom column headers in your screen caps? (True Peak, PLR, LRA etc)

VP

[6233638]

Can I ask how you are getting your custom column headers in your screen caps? (True Peak, PLR, LRA etc)

They're just expressions with things like:

Code: ( True Peak ) [Select]

listitem([Peak Level (R128)],0)
The reason I did this, is because the default names for a lot of these fields takes up too much space with the auto sizing enabled.

[MrC]

The "hidden" header text will shift the entire header to the right a bit - it depends on how much stuff is up front.

In some other thread, I suggested/requested an enhancement for header text, or HTLM text in general.  Since HTML text is being used throughout MC, it would be nice to have support for the display=none attribute.  It could be included in any elements where you want output, but not have it displayed.  This would allow sorting based on leading text which is never output.  It's a poor-man's sorting technique.

As for sorting your album variants, if there are only a few variants, I'd use an IfElse clause that outputs a numeric sort number.  If there are many, I'd construct a sort-key lookup string, which is matched/captured with an RE that includes the sort number, and output the sort number.  It really depends on your circumstances.

[glynor]

You mentioned that it did not shift headers over to the right in your post, but that's not the case for me. Is that something that has changed over time?

You misinterpreted me... I was "asking".  I thought, but wasn't positive, that MrC was saying that it did not shift, and I was surprised.  Seems like I was correct after all!

I haven't actually set such a system up, because Grouping annoys me in other ways.

[connersw]

I agree with you that Grouping is a disaster (particularly in regards to sorting).  The base cause is that "Groups" aren't really part of the file listing.  They are essentially the same thing as Panes or Categories, but displayed in the File Listing area.  That leads to confusing things like the play order not matching the visible order.

I agree they are confusing, except they really aren't the same thing as Categories which is why the File Listing does not always look right compared to your Grouping.  They really effect the play order which is what causes that play order not matching the visible order issue.  To effect the display of the File Listing area you need to use Customize View -> Set rules for file display -> Modify Results -> Sort By.  It's taken me a long time to figure it out, and I'm still not exactly sure I have it straight. 

[glynor]

Yeah, all of mine are sorted that way.

Grouping overrides the sort order, even if you do it that way (Grouping always wins the sort contest).  Except that playback order follows the sort order defined in the view (as you explained), even though the visible order in the list follows grouping.

As I said before... I want grouping to just group "in place" using the existing sort order.  That would be so much less confusing and would eliminate the need for these weird hacks.

[kstuart]

With regards to sort order, the "Recently Imported" list is often not in track number.

Since "Add Album to Playing Now" has never been implemented, then there is no way to add an album (as opposed to a single track) from the Recently Imported list, that works correctly.

[6233638]

I've run into a few problems with the new grouping, and wondered if anyone knows whether it's possible to fix.
 
I'm currently using this code, which seems to sort things correctly:

Code: [Select]

<font size="10" alpha="0" color="ffffff">[Year] formatdate([Date (Release),0],yyyyMMdd) [Disc #] [Channels]<//font>Delimit([Year],/]/ ,/[)[Album]Delimit([Description],/),/ /()Delimit(if(isrange([Channels],1-2),,/ ‒/ Multichannel))
However, it's grouping discs separately so that a 2CD album is split into two groups, which I don't want.
 

 
If I remove [Disc #] then a multi-disc album is grouped as a single item (good) but when each disc has its own name, they are split up (also good) but often get displayed in the wrong order as they sort by disc name rather than disc number. (bad)
 

 
I would also prefer to have it so that albums which don't have a disc number appear below albums which do have a disc number in the list, if everything else is the same. Right now they appear at the top.
 
 
I know that these would be relatively simple fixes by changing the files, but I'd prefer not to adjust metadata to work around Media Center, I'd rather have the Media Center group & sort the files correctly, even if it means using these arcane workarounds.
 
 
Eventually I'd like to create a library view which automatically excludes multichannel discs if a stereo version exists, and only displays the highest quality recording (according to Dynamic Range (DR)]) but that's something for another time.

[MrC]

You've run into a limitation of MC using a single string as both the Group and Sort.

For your other goal regarding conditionally excluding multichannel discs, this will require global variables.  Ask in another thread if you want help.