Display album count per artist

[pietergdp]

In the column browser, it would be nice if we had the option to display the album count next to the artist name, instead of the track count and then display the track count next to the album name.

[redwing]

+1 for adding "album count" in addition to the current "track count" so that either the two or one count can be optionally displayed next to the field and be able to sorted by each count.
I have to add that currently there is no way to sort fields by "album count" with MB (there are only some ways to display them without sorting).

[Alumni]

+1, this has crossed my mind too.

[ma_t14]

+1 for adding an album count field

[Steven]

i am not willing to add support for showing both Album and Track count at the same time and would prefer not to add an option for which it does show. Do you think it makes more sense just to show the Album Count against an artist instead of what MB currently does?

[Zak]

If it's one or the other I would much prefer to keep track count.

Album count only seems useful if a library consists of whole/complete albums because it really means "You have tracks from x different albums by this artist", regardless of whether you have every track from that album or not. This is a lot more ambiguous than "You have x tracks by this artist". I have a lot of albums where I have only one or two tracks, not to mention a lot of singles, so for my library at least album count would be a pretty meaningless number.

Does a track on a mixed artist compilations count toward that artist's album count? If not, how do you exclude it from the total? 

[psychoadept]

Ditto Zak.

[redwing]

i am not willing to add support for showing both Album and Track count at the same time and would prefer not to add an option for which it does show. Do you think it makes more sense just to show the Album Count against an artist instead of what MB currently does?

Replacing track count with album count won't be welcomed to most users as each means a different thing. I'm not sure why you refuse to support album count as an option (Winamp defaults to show both), but a new field "Artist Album Count" (like "Artist Track Count") could be a compromise.

Does a track on a mixed artist compilations count toward that artist's album count? If not, how do you exclude it from the total? 

It depends. Look at how thumbnail browser counts it differently when artist or album artist is selected.
But if it's implemented as a new field, I think it should exclude compilations, given the meaning of the filed.

[Novatlan]

Resurrecting this from the dead because this feature is very dear to my heart.
I collect albums and honestly do not care how many tracks an album has. So I would like to see the number of albums rather than number of tracks for each genre/artist, etc...
Maybe this could be implemented for MB3?

[psychoadept]

You can make this happen with library explorer. I'll give better instructions when I'm at my computer.

[psychoadept]

Okay, so if you set Library Explorer to use (for instance) Artist/Album, then check the "Show Count" option, it will show you the number of albums for each artist (and the number of tracks for each album).

Actually, I think what would work better is to use "Artist" as your category and tell it to sort by "Album"

Here's a cap of my library with those settings:

[pietergdp]

Since I made this post, I changed the way I use MB. I realized that using the thumbnail browser lets you do this by grouping by artist.

[redwing]

Why has this topic suddenly become "MB 101" class? If your only concern is how to display album count, there's one more way: Artists view has a setting to show album count under artist picture.

I don't know about the OP, but what's requested here is either (1) album count as a sortable column in column browser like current track count or (2) "Artist Album Count" as a new field like current "Artist Track Count" field.