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?