New user, help with custom sorting?

[KadintheGuitarDude]

Hi everyone, just downloaded Musicbee as I've been looking to finally stop using iTunes. I imported my library from there with no problem but I'm currently trying to figure out how to get some custom sorting figured out. I like using the Album Covers view, and what I'm trying to do is have the albums sorted by Album Artist > Album by year. The current issue is that I have some artists with albums that have tracks with different release years within a single album. This causes each album where this is the case to be split up into multiple versions of that album sorted by the release years of the individual tracks within it (screenshot below; you can see multiple copies of the "Singles" album for the artist in question).

<blockquote class="imgur-embed-pub" lang="en" data-id="a/E2iHzvD" data-context="false" ><a href="//imgur.com/a/E2iHzvD"></a></blockquote><script async src="//s.imgur.com/min/embed.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

Is there a way to sort the albums by Album Artist > Album (year) without this issue of splitting up albums that have multiple tracks with different release years? I've tried a few different combinations in the custom sorting options but haven't found one that works yet.

This is not the only issue I'm trying to resolve with custom sorting, but I'm going to ask one question at a time to keep things simple and organized.

[KadintheGuitarDude]

Apologies for the broken link, I thought I'd done it correctly. Here's the image:

[Zak]

You're tripping yourself up by creating a pretend "Singles" album, which isn't really an album at all, because it will be hard to make it behave like one.

As you have already discovered, if you sort by year and the year values are different, there is no way to then have those tracks grouped together.
You could store two year values, one for the album and one for the track - the Original Year tag might come in useful here - and then sort on the Album year to stop the tracks being separated.

Another possibility is to create a new Virtual Tag and sort on that instead.
Use a formula to check if the Album title is "Singles", and in that case substitute a different date to sort on instead of the one in the Date tag. It's up to you what this would be, but as you aren't displaying the year in this view, you could use something like '0001' purely for sorting purposes which would display your Singles before other album releases.

Sorry, I don't have time to include full examples, but hopefully this helps with other ways to think about the layout.

[KadintheGuitarDude]

You could store two year values, one for the album and one for the track - the Original Year tag might come in useful here - and then sort on the Album year to stop the tracks being separated.

It looks like the "Original Year" tag is doing the trick! I've got it set to custom sort by "Sort Album Artist" > "Original Year" and so far that's been working. Thanks!