Is there a way to have a better sorting?

[Ludra]

Hi,

I'm a new user, I want to switch from foobar2000 to MusicBee, I don't think I will really miss it except for one thing, the library sorting.
With foobar, I always sort my music by Album Artist like that: %album artist%|%album%|[[%discnumber%.]%tracknumber%. ][%track artist% - ]%title%
With MusicBee, I can obviously choose "Album Artist" with the library explorer but all my library seems pretty confused with many track numbers instead of album artist, is there a way to exclude those numbers to hide my laziness? I'm tired of tagging.
I took screenshots:
http://imgbox.com/o6nlbaz7 (foobar)
http://imgbox.com/qZp2TT4g (MusicBee)

[jasongnome]

imgbox is down at the moment so I can't see your screenshots, but if you click on the word above you main display (in mine it says Album and Tracks) you'll get a drop down menu, the second from bottom option is Sort By and one of the options in there is Custom Sorting, where you can choose the sort order with no limitation.

[psychoadept]

As jasongnome says, you can use the menu at the top left of the main panel.  You can also right click in the column headers to get the same Sort By menu.

In your case, you might also want to use a virtual tag in your sorting scheme to include the optional track artist component (I'm assuming that's based on compilation albums).

[Steven]

since you mention not wanting to tag, i am guessing you havent tagged the files and are relying on MB to parse the filename to determine the album artist when the file is imported.
I suggest you use right click/ auto-tag by track/ derive tags from filename and set the naming template as appropriate

[Ludra]

Thanks for the quick responses!

Is imgbox still down for you?

I will explain. In fact, I have a really big library, even if there is only a few numbers, many albums are misstaggeg that way. Those files have been taggeg in the wrong way by another people.
I don't use the column browser so I don't have to worry about it, it's just about the library explorer, I really would like to have a clean library explorer with album artists and not track numbers in place of like in the foobar screen. Because it seems they have put track numbers for album artist...
I just discovered the "Definite Custom Sorting" option of the library explorer, thanks to you, do you know the pattern to imitate my old config and put those misstagged files into [Empty] or question marks ?

In my foobar2000 JScript Panel, the pattern was "View by Album Artist // %album artist%|%album%|[[%discnumber%.]%tracknumber%. ][%track artist% - ]%title%" and it was hiding them. I'm almost sure that we can imitate that with MusicBee.

[Steven]

check the wiki for info on virtual tags.
However your foobar formula appears to rely on album artist first and foremost, so i still think my previous post applies. You can check the actual file tags using the tag inspector which is opened from the tag editor dialog

[jasongnome]

imgbox is working now, yes.

IMO, whatever player you use will always look messy if your music is tagged that badly.

[psychoadept]

Also, if the "infer and update tags from filenames" feature doesn't help you, you might be able to do some editing en masse with the Additional Tagging & Reporting Tools plugin.  But be careful!  If you're not careful, you could make things a lot worse.

[Ludra]

Also, if the "infer and update tags from filenames" feature doesn't help you, you might be able to do some editing en masse with the Additional Tagging & Reporting Tools plugin.  But be careful!  If you're not careful, you could make things a lot worse.

Finally, I used the two features for the "easy job" and put this amount of files into a temporary playlist, I will organize them to fix the details progressively.
I will also be careful with the new files, I don't want to redo the same mistakes.
Btw, I try to organize these files by "specific issue" into my playlist for later but I can't find the shortcut to change track order or album order into a playlist.
Is it possible or do you usually use the queue to change the order? I always have my old habits.

[jasongnome]

With new files use the inbox feature, that way you can check and repair the tags before the files go into the main playlist and it's a lot quicker and easier.

in Preferences>Library, where it says "new file action", tick the box that says "add to inbox". The any new files you put in you music folder will go into a separate library called Inbox while you sort out the tags. Once that's done just highlight the files, rightclick and use send to > music library

[podfish]

As jasongnome says, you can use the menu at the top left of the main panel.  You can also right click in the column headers to get the same Sort By menu.

In your case, you might also want to use a virtual tag in your sorting scheme to include the optional track artist component (I'm assuming that's based on compilation albums).

I'm trying to use the 'sort' to find the podcasts that were just uploaded. Normally I'd expect clicking on the "Date Modifed" header on the Podcasts page would do that sort. I also don't see the 'Sort By' menu when I right-click. I don't see one in the menu in the top left of the main panel.

is this supported in the podcast tab?

[CritterMan]

My suggestion is to create a copy of your library, sign up for MusicBrainz, install Picard, and use it to retag the copy of your library. Then, add this copy of your library as a new library in MB. Try using the MusicBrainz-tagged library for a while, see if you like it better than tagging your tracks by hand.