Author Topic: Sorting and Grouping between folders  (Read 5653 times)

Holbytla

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Don't know if there is already a way to do this. Would like to be able to sort and group differently between folders. For example group a certain way for my "Artist A" folder and another way for "Artist B".

psychoadept

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Hi, welcome to the forum!

There certainly is a way.  Have you checked out this page yet? https://musicbee.fandom.com/wiki/File_Organization

The way I would probably approach the situation you describe is using exceptions. That will be much easier to understand and adjust quickly than trying to get it all into a single template.
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Holbytla

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Thank you, will check it out if it does what I have in mind. 8)

Zak

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OP should also clarify if they mean sorting and grouping their files, or their view of those files in MusicBee.
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Holbytla

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OP should also clarify if they mean sorting and grouping their files, or their view of those files in MusicBee.

Their view of those files in MusicBee is what I meant.

psychoadept

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Ah, I interpreted folder as referring to the file system.

Your best bet in the interface is to use filters or playlists and assign different views.
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Holbytla

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Ah, I interpreted folder as referring to the file system.

Your best bet in the interface is to use filters or playlists and assign different views.

My wish is to use grouping only with one particular artist and not use it at all for the rest of my collection.

psychoadept

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I don't think there's a way to that without using different views. Maybe you could hack something with a virtual tag that's empty for all artists except that one, but depending on where in the interface it is, MusicBee may still convert an empty value to Unknown <Tag>.
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Holbytla

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I don't think there's a way to that without using different views. Maybe you could hack something with a virtual tag that's empty for all artists except that one, but depending on where in the interface it is, MusicBee may still convert an empty value to Unknown <Tag>.

Oh well, thanks for your help. Maybe its something for a future version of MusicBee.  ;)

Intothisworld

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+1

I would also really appreciate this feature. I have a bunch of multi-disc albums, and some of these albums have different cover art for each disc. When I set the grouping option to include or "disc #" like this...


...I can view the cover art for each individual disc, and it looks super sleek and nice.  (I've also used a "set subtitle" setting as well.)


But when I go to view any other multi-disc albums that don't have multiple cover arts, it still breaks them up by disc and just repeats the one cover art.

It looks really silly, unfortunately, and as far as I know, there's no good way to fix this...

Some kind of toggle or custom grouping set on a per-album basis would be freaking amazing. The ideal would be the ability to keep the first set of discs the way it is, but have the 2nd set look like this...


Anyway, thanks for everything you guys do. I'm sure you hear this all the time, but MusicBee is undoubtedly the best music library software out there.  ::) I've only been using it for a few weeks now, but I'm constantly blown away by the customizability of it. I've never been able to actually organize a music library how I see it in my head before 😂
Last Edit: September 13, 2021, 07:51:59 AM by Intothisworld

Intothisworld

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Oh, if you guys ever do get into the nitty-gritty of implementing this feature, one more thing... Can I also request that you enable the ability to not have the album header field and album sub-header field repeat for each grouping? What I mean by that...



Anyway, thanks again.  ::)

Zak

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I would also really appreciate this feature. I have a bunch of multi-disc albums, and some of these albums have different cover art for each disc. When I set the grouping option to include or "disc #" like this...
Yeah, don't do that.

As you've already discovered, adding Disc# to the Sorting/Grouping settings does let you display different cover art for each disc, but MusicBee will do that for all albums. You're asking it to be a bit too clever given the information it has to work with.

Try creating a custom tag and adding that tag to the Sorting/Grouping settings.
Then you can tell MusicBee to display separate disc art for just the albums that need it, instead of all of them.
(I'm not sure what you've done for Set Subtitle, but that might work too)

(More generally, the Sorting/Grouping settings affect most views in some way, so don't add built-in tags there unless you're absolutely sure it's what you want.)

Oh, if you guys ever do get into the nitty-gritty of implementing this feature, one more thing... Can I also request that you enable the ability to not have the album header field and album sub-header field repeat for each grouping? What I mean by that...
That's another side-effect of telling MusicBee to separate albums based on a tag value.
What it's displaying is correct - it doesn't know that you're displaying different parts of the same album, so it repeats the album details again.
There's no easy workaround for that now.

By the way, your request isn't really related to the original request in this thread.
Maybe a moderator could move it to a separate thread and give it a suitable name...?
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Intothisworld

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By the way, your request isn't really related to the original request in this thread.
Maybe a moderator could move it to a separate thread and give it a suitable name...?
Oh whoops, I interpreted his post as wanting to set sorting/grouping settings on a per-artist/per-album basis. I guess I might be misunderstanding it then, my bad.

Try creating a custom tag and adding that tag to the Sorting/Grouping settings.
Then you can tell MusicBee to display separate disc art for just the albums that need it, instead of all of them.
(I'm not sure what you've done for Set Subtitle, but that might work too)
That's a good idea. I had been trying to use "set subtitle" and another related virtual tag for this grouping at first, but it broke it all up in a similar way, except more fragmented... Using "disc #" was the closest results I could get out of it to what I was looking for. Just tried the custom tag and it made everything group together just the way I wanted. Thanks for the advice!