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[drmimosa]

I would like to make a view that displays my albums like my CDs back in the day - on the shelf, in the order I put them there.

Any ideas how to do this?

Make a custom "Shelf
Order" tag?

Is the a way to automate filling out a custom tag in numerical order, like you can do with "fill in track numbers from list order"? For example, say I want all jazz albums ranked by playback frequency but starting with place 4389...

So I have a few ideas but would welcome more before I start manually tagging. Thanks!

[drmimosa]

Or, if I want to add an album between place 7 and 8 on the 'shelf', how would I do this? Custom tag '7.5' for shelf order? But then how would I shift the remaining 1450 albums up a notch?

I don't think any of my other apps sort items this way, Kindle for example. All sortings are comp sci type algorithm sorts, like A-Z or Date or Last Used etc. But that's not really how we organize our stuff on a shelf. On a shelf, you sort according to an intuitive order and then remember what is where according to location. It would be cool to have a digital system like this for media.

[dtc]

You really need some sort of hierarchy to start with - something like a Shelf tag and probably one or two under that.  Then the tagging to sort individual albums becomes less complicated. First you need to identify your ordering scheme. It may be genre and some sort of sub-genre, for example, even if genre and sub-genre are your own creations, not the traditional ones.

Well you could use a string tag with alternating letters and numbers, something like this :

a
a1
a1a
a1a2
a1a2a
a1a2b
a1a2b1
a2
a2a
a3
b

You could use both upper and lower case. A normal alpha sort would then put them in order. That lets you add a new entry wherever you want.  Works, but it is not very intuitive nor automatic.

You could also create a new tag with a Decimal type. Then you can add new entries as needed simply by adding another digit to the number, sort of like the old Dewey Decimal system.  The integer part could become the shelf number, you then get 0-9 as the first digit to do your first ordering for each shelf.  Maybe more intuitive than the first scheme, but still somewhat abstract and not each to automate.

You could also use stacks to create each shelf using a shelf tag and then stacks for each shelf using other tags and maybe eventually the letter/number or decimal scheme. 

What you really need is a playlist type interface where you can drag and drop albums. Not sure how to do that.

[Moe]

Is the a way to automate filling out a custom tag in numerical order, like you can do with "fill in track numbers from list order"? For example, say I want all jazz albums ranked by playback frequency but starting with place 4389...

Yes, say you do make a custom field called Shelf Order.  Highlight any amount of songs you want, then in the tag window, for Shelf Order enter =counter() and it will number them sequentially.  If you want the counting to start at 4389 then enter =counter(4389) and it will count up from there.

Or, if I want to add an album between place 7 and 8 on the 'shelf', how would I do this? Custom tag '7.5' for shelf order? But then how would I shift the remaining 1450 albums up a notch?

You can drag and drop songs into the order you want on the playing now screen. So, you could get them in the order you want, then use the counter trick I mentioned above to lock in that sequence.  Then, later, if you want to add a new song between 700 and 701 you could drag it into position, then choose song 701 and all the remaining songs in the list and use =counter(701) and it will renumber the remaining tracks.

This post makes me think of this movie scene.

[drmimosa]

Right on! Great movie...

So if I use the =counter tag every file will be sequenced. Is there a way to make every album have a single number from the counter function, so all files from say Master of Puppets will be 1 and Bach Cello Suites 2?

Separate numbers for files could work, however, it would result in a shelf sort order and the view could be set to still make sure tracks numbers are ordered within albums.

Thanks!

[Moe]

You could make your Shelf Order field a relational field, so that every song on an album has the same value.  This would be a bit tricky to do in conjunction with counter though.  You'd need to make a view that shows only one song from each album, maybe a smart list that only shows track #1 songs.  Then use counter on the resulting list.  This would give every song on an album the same shelf number value as well as giving each album a unique number.

Here is a bit on relational fields, if you're not familiar https://wiki.jriver.com/index.php/Library_Fields#Relational_Fields
and here is the info on counter() https://wiki.jriver.com/index.php/Miscellaneous_Functions#Counter

[dtc]

The relationship field would work but I believe you have to be sure your album names are all unique.  Greatest Hits could be a problem.  Unfortunately you cannot do a relationship field based on 2 tags, like [album] and [artist].
 
If you want to use the counter idea, you could make your tag a decimal number. Then when you add a new album, you can just manually add a decimal number between the existing ones - like 92.1 between 92 and 93.  Then you would not have to change all the other entries below the new one.  Changing all the tags could become a issue, especially if you are writing them to the files.

So, smart list or search to get just track #1, send those to Playing Now for re-arranging and then counter function with a relational decimal field might be a good starting point.

If you do a lot of new entries, you can always occasionally do the whole process over again to get rid of the decimals if they get messy.

[Moe]

The relationship field would work but I believe you have to be sure your album names are all unique.  Greatest Hits could be a problem.  Unfortunately you cannot do a relationship field based on 2 tags, like [album] and [artist].

MC plays nice in this regard.  It's smart enough to not lump all albums with the same name together when using a relational field "store one value for each album". 

If you want to use the counter idea, you could make your tag a decimal number. Then when you add a new album, you can just manually add a decimal number between the existing ones - like 92.1 between 92 and 93.  Then you would not have to change all the other entries below the new one.  Changing all the tags could become a issue, especially if you are writing them to the files.

Using decimals could definitely work.  Another option is to set the counter to counter(10,10) This will number your albums 10,20,30,40 etc.  Then you could add in 11,12,13 etc.  Same idea as decimals, just using whole numbers instead.  This would also give you a bit of padding at the beginning, albums 1-9.  Of course, if you want an even bigger gap between albums you could set counter to counter(20,20), etc. which would label your albums 20,40,60

[dtc]

MC plays nice in this regard.  It's smart enough to not lump all albums with the same name together when using a relational field "store one value for each album". 

How does it do that?  It must look at [Artist] also, although that is not documented.  MC typically uses [Album] as a distinct field.

[Moe]

How does it do that?  It must look at [Artist] also, although that is not documented.  MC typically uses [Album] as a distinct field.

I don't know, I believe it's the wizard that lives inside my computer.

I did test and confirm before posting though.

[dtc]

Good to know and makes the solution easier.

[drmimosa]

Wow, all super helpful information. Thank you! Will get to work on an autobiographical shelf order...

[blgentry]

You might want to build this based on some other fields as a start with over-rides for manually moving things around.

If your ordering is truly arbitrary, then you can do it all with just one field.  I call mine "Arbitrary Order".  That's hard to spell and weird, so you might want to use something simple like "order", or "shelf" or something.

Once you have established some kind of order, inserting in between two, (like between 7 and 8 ) is actually pretty easy:  Just multiply all of them by 10 first.  So 7 becomes 70.  Position 8 becomes 80.  Then you have 9 slots in between 70 and 80 to work with.  It's easy to do in one shot:

Highlight all albums, open the tag action window; find your Order field and type:

Code: [Select]

=math([Order Field Name Here] * 10)
Press enter and they will all multiply by 10.

In practice, this becomes kind of unwieldy though, as typing numbers into fields isn't nearly as easy as dragging things around.  This is why I suggested that, if your scheme has some logic to it, that you replicate that logic using fields.

As a weird example:  I knew a guy a long time ago with a GIANT collection of movie soundtracks.  He organized them by:

Alphabetical Movie Genre (like Western, Action, etc)
Year of Movie
Alphabetical Movie title

All neatly on a bunch of shelves. 

You could replicate this digitally with a few fields and be off and running.  One of your fields could be a numeric field so you could tweak things around.

Good luck.

Brian.