Author Topic: Album Artist sorting + VA compilation songs sorting?  (Read 294 times)

AbridgedPause

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Hey everyone. Is there a way to set the Explorer view by Album Artists, but for those artists' albums to also include their Various Artists compilations appearances?

My Various Artists compilations are tagged with Various Artists as the Album Artist, and the songs have the respective bands listed in the Artist field. The problem is that those Various Artists compilations have a lot of one-off bands that I rarely or never listen to, so I don't want those one-off artists bulking up my Album Artist scroller on the left (as they do if I set my Explorer to Artist instead of Album Artist). Is it possible to set it so that ONLY bands that have Album Artist entries additionally show their Various Artists compilations appearances? In other words, if a band does not have a standalone album, then it won't show up in list. But if they have a standalone release, then the albums panel will show the albums and also show their songs from their Various Artists compilation appearances.

Alternatively, is there a way to mask or hide bands that do not have standalone albums in the regular Artist view?

I hope that I'm making sense.

Zak

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The best solution I've come up with is to use a Virtual Tag in place of Album Artist. I've called it "Filter Album Artist 30+".

Code
$If(<Album Artist>="[Various Artists]","[Various Artists]",$If($Count(<Title>,<Album Artist>)>29,$Sort(<Album Artist>),[Other]))

Compilations are always grouped under [Various Artists], artists with less than 30 tracks in my library are grouped under [Other], while anyone else gets their own entry. This keeps the list from getting clogged up with random bands that I don't need to be able to select individually. You can just adjust the cutoff point depending on how many tracks an artist should have for you to consider them worthy of being shown separately.

I use it in the Thumbnail Browser, but you should be able to do something similar for other elements:



This has always been a problem for libraries with lots of compilation albums. I think there needs to be a better, built-in solution, but I'm not sure what it is yet.
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