Sort albums chronologically without splitting up multi-year albums?

[PhillyJay28]

Hello all,

For tracks that don't belong to a true album (singles, unreleased songs, etc.), I combine them all into an album I call "Other."  Every artist has it's own "Other" album.

I want to display my albums chronologically, so I sort by year. The problem is that all of the tracks within my "Other" albums have different years.  This causes MusicBee to split the tracks up into multiple, separate "Other" albums (one album for each unique year).

Obviously, I can simply sort by Album and then all of the "Other" tracks stay together.  But then the albums are not chronological; they're alphabetical by album title.

Is there any way I can force MusicBee to keep all of the "Other" tracks together in one album, but still display all of the albums chronologically?

Ideally, I'd like the most recent album first, then go backwards chronologically through the rest of the albums, and finally the "Other" album would be listed last.

Any suggestions on how to achieve this would be amazing! Thanks!

Here's an image showing how 2Pac's "Other" tracks are currently being split up into a 1998 "Other" album and a 2003 "Other" album:

[psychoadept]

Hi, welcome to the forum!

The simplest approach would be to use the original year tag to store the date of the non-album tracks.  Then you can leave the year field blank or set it to some arbitrary value to keep those tracks grouped for sorting

[PhillyJay28]

Thanks for the response!

Okay, I could do that approach.  The only issue is I have thousands of "Other" tracks.  Is there any way to automate the process of swapping the values in the Year tag with the values in the Original Year tag?

[psychoadept]

Check out the additional tagging & reporting tools plugin, it can do that.  I think it's up to date with latest tags Steven added.

Test on a small set first, but the you can probably do the rest in one go.

[boroda]

yes, plugin supports original year tag. keep in mind that you need to use latest mb patch as there has been a bug in mb with writing original year from plugin.