Genre>Artist List Functionality

[troutinabout]

I've searched through the forums and have seen posts on this topic since 2012 (at least), but never found an answer or valid response.  If this has already been asked AND answered, please direct me to that thread if possible.

My request is the ability to view a list of artists by genre, not the albums.  Once the artist is selected, THEN display albums.

For instance, take the genre of Jazz, I don't want to go see every album in that genre, but rather every artist in that genre.  Once I select an artist, then I'd like to see that artists albums.

Is this possible?

 

Thanks!

[blaubär]

@RasKafka

 had a similar idea

[troutinabout]

@blaubär

Thanks for the reply and thread link, but it seems like what @RasKafka was suggesting is assigning a specific genre to an artist (ie- Bob Marley is genre Reggae and nothing other than Reggae).  

Staying with the Marley/Reggae example, what I'm asking about is selecting genre Reggae, then seeing a list of all artists of genre Reggae, but what I'm seeing now is all albums of genre Reggae.  

[blaubär]

52 minutes ago, troutinabout said:

Staying with the Marley/Reggae example, what I'm asking about is selecting genre Reggae, then seeing a list of all artists of genre Reggae, but what I'm seeing now is all albums of genre Reggae.  

Genre is a tag, and tags are given to tracks, not artists. Raskafka suggested to build a database to map artist to genre. If you don't want that, how should Poweramp decide which artists belong to a genre ? If there is any track by this artist that has the genre ? Or a minimum number of tracks ? Or a minimum percentage ?

[troutinabout]

I see the similarity in my request now, thanks.  Considering what you said about tags given to tracks not artists, let's say I manually assign the Reggae genre tag on every single one of Bob Marley's tracks.  Selecting Reggae in the genre list would still return albums and not solely the artist.  So you'e correct, there would need to be a db mapping between genre <=> artist, but also an update in list-view/drilldown to select this as a next option.

 

[andrewilley]

I think the only way to deal with this sort of fairly specific request logically would be if Max could add fully customisable library category options, allowing the user to create their own categories with various layers of grouping and sorting, so songs could be displayed in pretty much any sequence they want. I've no idea how complex that would be to achieve though.

I did provide a fuller suggestion of how this could work in response to another user request a while ago:

Andre

[Absinthequ]

I think we really need this. This would probably be a Artists by Genre category. The only time I can use the current Genre category is when shuffling. The lists become way too large/time consuming to Browse.

Let's say you have 50+ artists in one genre and you could easily have 10+ album listings for each artist. A Listing of 50+ Artists would be so much easier to browse than a listing of 500+ Albums.

This would make it so easy to queue only selected artists of a particular Genre quickly. It also gives you the ability to group/manipulate Artists into small lists, like "My Favorite Bands" or "Bands I've Seen Live".

This would be an excellent addition to Poweramp @maxmp

[w3wilkes]

I think you want it to work like Logitech Media Server. LMS runs on just about any platform, except Android. I use Poweramp on my phone for Bluetooth in the car and headphone use. For home based audio systems LMS is what I use. From here I can drill to an artist in the list or All albums in artist sequence.

 

[andrewilley]

There have been so many requests over the years for various specific personalisations of the category system, allowing user-defined layers and sorting options (such as this thread for Genre>Artist>Album, sorting albums by year, separating the display of multiple-disc albums using disc#, and tons of others) that I still firmly believe the best long-term answer to fulfill all of these requests is not to merely tweak the current options one at a time, or to add new ones to an increasingly confusing list (Albums, Artists, Album-Artists, Albums-by-Artist, etc) but to provide a new fully user-customisable system for Library Categories - either to allow users to simply modify the existing categories with a bit more flexibility than just the List Options menu, or for more advanced users to to build their own esoteric ones from scratch.

It needn't be complicated from the user side, it would really only require two stages:

• First choose the top-down sorting order, with as many tag-based hierarchical layers as you like (using a simple dragable list with tickboxes to enable items such as Artist, Album, Genre, Year, Composer, Disc#, Track#, Folder, Filename, Date Modified/Added, etc)
• Then choose which of those selected sorting levels you also want to act as a 'drill-down' category level (again, being as flat or as multi-layered as you want) This would also just use a simple tickbox to indicate the grouping levels (could even be included in the same list as above).

I went into this suggestion in a bit more detail in:

However I have no idea how complex this system would be to implement internally, and it could create a lot of extra work for @maxmp.

Andre

[Absinthequ]

13 hours ago, w3wilkes said:

I think you want it to work like Logitech Media Server. LMS runs on just about any platform, except Android. I use Poweramp on my phone for Bluetooth in the car and headphone use. For home based audio systems LMS is what I use. From here I can drill to an artist in the list or All albums in artist sequence.

 

Yes.

 

9 hours ago, andrewilley said:

However I have no idea how complex this system would be to implement internally, and it could create a lot of extra work for @maxmp.

Andre

I like this idea and I only do web design/coding so maybe I'm wrong, but I feel like this may be asking for a large amount of re-coding/re-design to make this happen and debug. I think Genre is one of the last/oldest category listing changes being requested, so maybe it would be easier to add this and make customization a long term goal.

There must be a reason this gets ignored and I feel like this could be as easy as copying and pasting the current Genre category as a new category. EX: Artist by Genre.

[andrewilley]

15 hours ago, Absinthequ said:

I like this idea and I only do web design/coding so maybe I'm wrong, but I feel like this may be asking for a large amount of re-coding/re-design to make this happen and debug.

That is my concern too. It all depends on how unified and modular the current category code is. If Categories all go through one set of routines then it would not be too hard to implement, but if every Category has its own hard-coded and unique programming, it could be a major task. One plus side would be that all of the current Categories could be encoded via the same system, making everything much easier to keep updated in future. 

Andre