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Author Topic: Using "Complete Album" in views?  (Read 2322 times)

6233638

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Using "Complete Album" in views?
« on: February 18, 2014, 05:01:33 pm »

I was wondering if there was some way to evaluate whether a view is displaying the complete album or not.
 
"Complete Album" seems to refer to the library status of that album, and not the view status of that album.
For example, I was trying to set up a "high resolution" view which uses "Bit depth is not 16-bit"
 
This mostly works fine, but I have some albums which have a mixture of 16-bit and 24-bit tracks - these are typically soundtracks or albums which have been purchased from sites like Bandcamp. The bonus tracks are often in a different format from the rest of the album.
 
If I use "Complete Album is True" the files are still listed, because the complete album is in the library, it's just not complete in the current view.
 
There is an option to expand the list to display the full album in the view, but I'm not seeing any way to exclude tracks if the full album is not being listed.
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mwillems

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Re: Using "Complete Album" in views?
« Reply #1 on: February 18, 2014, 05:58:57 pm »

I was wondering if there was some way to evaluate whether a view is displaying the complete album or not.
 
"Complete Album" seems to refer to the library status of that album, and not the view status of that album.
For example, I was trying to set up a "high resolution" view which uses "Bit depth is not 16-bit"
 
This mostly works fine, but I have some albums which have a mixture of 16-bit and 24-bit tracks - these are typically soundtracks or albums which have been purchased from sites like Bandcamp. The bonus tracks are often in a different format from the rest of the album.
 
If I use "Complete Album is True" the files are still listed, because the complete album is in the library, it's just not complete in the current view.
 
There is an option to expand the list to display the full album in the view, but I'm not seeing any way to exclude tracks if the full album is not being listed.

The current criteria used to populate that tag would need to be changed to make it view-based: http://wiki.jriver.com/index.php/Multiple_Artist_Albums#Complete_Albums

As it is, it's mostly a useful tool for finding lost tracks when a rip or import gets goofed up.  

The only way I can think of to make it useful in views the way you want, would be to break one of the criteria that doesn't affect your usual views, like changing the filepath for some of the tracks on albums with split bitdepth or something.  But that seems like a pretty bad workaround.
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6233638

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Re: Using "Complete Album" in views?
« Reply #2 on: February 18, 2014, 06:02:48 pm »

Thanks - I know that it's working as intended, I just hoped that someone might have figured out a work-around, or if it's something that could be changed.
 
The criteria for "complete album" is problematic as well. If I use the option to expand to full albums, it pulls in every version of an album in my library - but that ties into the fact that there's no "official" way to account for multiple album versions without simply renaming them to have different names in the album field.
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mwillems

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Re: Using "Complete Album" in views?
« Reply #3 on: February 18, 2014, 06:08:22 pm »

Thanks - I know that it's working as intended, I just hoped that someone might have figured out a work-around, or if it's something that could be changed.
 
The criteria for "complete album" is problematic as well. If I use the option to expand to full albums, it pulls in every version of an album in my library.

Yeah, that (and a number of other UI issues) are why I gave up on having the same album name for all versions.  So many things in MC don't work as expected when all versions of the album have the same "album" tag, so I just gave up on doing it "right."  I just put a parenthetical in the album title with what version it is, and everything in MC works correctly now, but that's not ideal  :(

Quote
but that ties into the fact that there's no "official" way to account for multiple album versions without simply renaming them to have different names in the album field.

Exactly.
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MrC

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Re: Using "Complete Album" in views?
« Reply #4 on: February 18, 2014, 08:17:33 pm »

I've suggested this in the past, and this became more desired with the new Audio Analysis features.

An Album name should be the conglomerate of [Album] and some new tag [Album Version].

   - [Album] would be the base album name (thus allowing cover art look-ups to succeed w/out the confounding supplemental stuff)

   - [Album Version] would be the supplemental stuff folks like to add, such as HD, 24-bit, Remastered, etc.
   
   - [Album] [Album Version] could be used by Views, sorting, and grouping, and Rename, when you asked for the [Album] (like Artist often means [Album Artist (auto)] in some places in the UI*.

The album analyzer would consider [Album] [Album Version] (not just [Album] as it does today).

This almost begs for an Album (auto) field.

*Note: I would personally do away with all this magic mapping of Album Artist (auto) --> Artist, etc. in the UI, and relabel overloaded terms like "Artist" (for example, in Group By, or column headers) to something distinct from the non-magic simple Artist field and label, for example, Artist (auto), or *Artist, or your chosen label goes here).  This overloading confuses users frequently.
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6233638

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Re: Using "Complete Album" in views?
« Reply #5 on: February 18, 2014, 08:37:15 pm »

I currently use [Description] for your proposed [Album Version], and it works well in my custom views. The problem is that functions like "Complete Album" don't take that into account.
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MrC

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Re: Using "Complete Album" in views?
« Reply #6 on: February 18, 2014, 08:39:11 pm »

Right, a lot of people do.  But anything we do breaks something, somewhere.  So its a Pick Your Poison choice.
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