Sorting release type

[popromancer]

Hi,

I am new to this forum but am very happy Musicbee user for a couple of years now.
I have a question regarding sorting of albums though, which I cannot workout myself so am hoping someone has a solution for this.

My collection is now sorted based on this breakdown:
Album Artist>Release Type>Year>Album>#Track>Track

Problem is, I have made a couple of values for release type and these can only be sorted (as for as I know) ascending(a-Z) or descending(Z-A), so you get:
Box Set
Compilation albums
Live albums
Singles
Studio albums
(Or the other way around, descending).

What I would like to have (reflecting for example Wikipedia's or Deezer's sorting order) is to sort these in this way:
1. Studio Albums
2. Live Albums
3. Compilation Albums
4. Box Sets
5. Singles

Does anybode know any possibilities to do this?


Thanks.

[phred]

A simple, but admittedly inelegant, solution would be to preface the release types with a number. The same as you have done in your example.

[redwing]

You could create a virtual tag that returns a number for each release type and then use it as sorting field instead of release type.
I'm not gonna write the formula myself since it's easy to construct if you consult the following example:

Splitting Your Collection to Big Genres

Now, do you want your folder structure to start with an artist name or some big genres?
If you want every track start with its own <Genre>, then it's easy:

<Genre>\<Album Artist>\<Album>\<Disc-Track#> <Title>

But not sure how useful that structure could be with tens of genres.
If you're like me and want to split the collection to two big folders, Classical and Pop(all the others), then use this in place of <Genre>:

$If(<Genre>="Classical","Classical","Pop")

Then all classical music tracks would start with \Classical\ path while all other tracks start with \Pop\ path.

What if you want to split it to three, Classical, Jazz and Pop?:

$If(<Genre>="Classical","Classical",$If(<Genre>="Jazz","Jazz","Pop"))

Now you got the idea. With the nested $If conditions, you can split your collection to as many genres as you like.

So you can replace "Studio Albums" with "1" and so forth, using the nested $If conditions.

[popromancer]

thanks both for replying.
I am going to try Redwings solution.