Genre->Artist->Album instead of Genre->Album?

[MewCore]

Hello,

Is there is a option to display in this fashion:

Genre->Artist->Album

From what I can tell there is only

Genre->Album

Since I have multiple albums by same artist scrolling though the list is cumbersome. 

 

Thank you, other than this I am enjoying this player very much.

[andrewilley]

Not at present, no. You can sort the Genre list so the albums are ordered first by artist and then by title - but it's still a flat list, there is no separate extra drill-down layer for Genre > Artist > Album.

It's actually something that has been requested before, and hopefully when Max implements a user-defined category feature in the future it will become possible. I actually mooted one possible solution a while back, which happened to use your exact request as an example within the wider feature request: 

Andre

[MewCore]

17 minutes ago, andrewilley said:

Not at present, no. You can sort the Genre list so the albums are ordered first by artist and then by title - but it's still a flat list, there is no separate extra drill-down layer for Genre > Artist > Album.

It's actually something that has been requested before, and hopefully when Max implements a user-defined category feature in the future it will become possible. I actually mooted one possible solution a while back, which happened to use your exact request as an example within the wider feature request: 

Andre

Tnx for the reply, I'm sorting albums by artist title as you suggested for a workaround but would welcome a simple option to display artists or albums when clicking on genre.

Your solution sound very flexible and would make navigation more user friendly and specific in the same time. 

Fingers crossed it gets implemented in some form

[andrewilley]

1 hour ago, MewCore said:

Your solution sound very flexible and would make navigation more user friendly and specific in the same time. 

Fingers crossed it gets implemented in some form

My concept suggestion came as a result of years of reading dozens (probably hundreds?) of very specific category display/sorting questions and feature requests. Each time someone would ask for a perfectly sensible individual feature that they would like to see, but each one would then need work and time to implement and test. I figured that a clear and simple, but highly-customisable, user-defined category feature might be a lot of extra work in the short term - and that's Max's call as to whether he thinks it's worth it - but it would probably answer all the previous and most similar future requests without making the existing categories so laden down with options that they could become unwieldy to use. Just my personal little blue-sky concept anyway.

Andre 

[Kundun]

Well, isn't the problem here that there is no actual correspondence (in terms of format specifications) between Artist and Genre? You can infer that information from albums genres (that themselves are inferred from tracks genre, that can vary from track to track) by a single artist, but this introduction of another data inference layer won't result in even more cumbersomeness in case of compilation/album with multiple genres/artists who spanned through genres during their career?

Edited June 24, 2020 by Kundun

[andrewilley]

Genre is a label for the track categorisation, not for an Artist or an Album. But once you have selected one Genre, assuming you don't want to just see a long list of all the songs (which is the first option in the list) it makes sense to subdivide all of those discovered tracks into logical groupings such as Artists and/or Albums for easier handling.

Andre

[ikonomov]

I would absolutely love to see this feature as well.  Most players do not have this library categorization, but a few do such as GoneMad, PlayerPro and USB Audio Player PRO and it is a very useful feature to have.

[GeilerHeinz]

+1

I hope this will be implemented someday. 

Regards

[w3wilkes]

Or give a selection list like Logitech Media Server after selecting the chosen Genre;

[andrewilley]

Rather than inserting more and more options into current Categories with each new user request, or adding new Categories to an already fairly expansive list, I still prefer my old idea of having a simple user-defined category facility - in which you could easily configure both the sorting and drill-down group levels to build your own lists exactly as you want them.

So as an example, you could choose to define something like:
    Sort ordering: Genre > Artist > Year [reverse order] > Album Title > Track#
    Grouping (i.e. each clickable drill-down) set on: Genre | Artist | Album Title
The above would allow you to drill down from a top list of genres, into a list of artist names, and then down to that artist's album titles (sorted by year, most recent first, then by album title), before finally getting down to the actual songs level which would be shown in track order.

Andre

[ikonomov]

1 hour ago, andrewilley said:

Rather than inserting more and more options into current Categories with each new user request, or adding new Categories to an already fairly expansive list, I still prefer my old idea of having a simple user-defined category facility - in which you could easily configure both the sorting and drill-down group levels to build your own lists exactly as you want them.

So as an example, you could choose to define something like:
    Sort ordering: Genre > Artist > Year [reverse order] > Album Title > Track#
    Grouping (i.e. each clickable drill-down) set on: Genre | Artist | Album Title
The above would allow you to drill down from a top list of genres, into a list of artist names, and then down to that artist's album titles (sorted by year, most recent first, then by album title), before finally getting down to the actual songs level which would be shown in track order.

Andre

I totally agree.  This IS the way to do it, but if that's not feasible due to too much work required having the option to enable at least this feature would be nice.

[GeilerHeinz]

Perhaps @maxmp could comment on that, whether Andres' user-defined category customisation feature concept is something he could imagine to implement in the near future or if a individual customisation like implementing a single additional drill-down-level within the category Genre (e.g. Genre|Album artist|Album) has more chances of success. 

Regards 

[andrewilley]

I agree that implementing a fully customisable solution would be quite a lot more work compared to just adding another extra fixed Category to the growing list.

However long-term, that extra work would hopefully pay for itself by reducing any further work needed on similar future requests to pretty-much zero - not to mention providing a hugely powerful tool for users to customise their own Libraries which would set PA way ahead of all the competition in this area. 

What I proposed was a simple editing screen something like this. Tapping on the bottom part of the screen would allow you to select the specific items that you want to use in your new Category, while the top half allows you to tap on the right to define the precise sorting order for each of those chosen items (e.g. ascending, descending, or shuffle) and to tap on the left to set wherever you want a 'clickable' drill-down level to occur. Obviously could be tarted up a bit with a nice animated display and better control icons, this is just a quick concept:

 

Andre

[drftr]

I personally hope the listing of albums directly under genre will remain as is because that's the way I'm listening.

 

I actually have the year before the album title to be able to listen to albums withon a genre in the order they were recorded as I like to listen to them in context; like a time machine. So an album title would look like "p1965 ~ Revolver", where the p stands for popular music. I exercise my right to be weird! 😉

 

If the Genre > Album order changes to Genre > Artist > Album at least I hope it can be toggled on/off.

 

drftr

[Ash Roarshock]

On 6/24/2020 at 3:38 AM, MewCore said:

Genre->Artist->Album

+1

[Portista]

This would be f*cking awesome!

 

Seriously, I don't kown why it's not already done.

 

 

[Mark Hewitt]

Upvote for this, for big libraries it's essential.

[GeilerHeinz]

@maxmp Is there any chance to see Genres->(Album) artists->Albums in the near future or do we have to abandon our hope?

Regards

[andrewilley]

@GeilerHeinz This is one of the items in a list of about 15-20 often requested but relatively trivial to code Feature Requests that I compiled a while ago. Hopefully Max may be able to find some time to tackle a few of the these "easy pickings" items between more major projects, which would tick off a bunch of common requests without taking up too much development time.

Andre

[Wallkatt]

Another request for Genre->Artist->Album.

I have kept a Rockbox'ed Fuze almost forever because it allows me to do this. It makes finding Bach Goldberg Variations (Gould) easy under Classical-Baroque->Bach->Goldberg (Gould) or Keith Jarrett Koln Konzert easy to find under Jazz [A-L]->Jarrett->Koln Konzert (I split my defined Genres into groups, eg, Classical-Baroque, Jazz [A-L], Rock [A-D], etc, to keep the list relatively short). If I just want to hear jazz but don't know what, I can go that genre and see what artists are available. I certainly don't expect others to do it like this but it would offer a world of categorization possibilities for others to work with.

One more thing: I would really like to have a single screen show at least 12 or more artists or albums just to keep things compact.

Sorry, I'm not leaving my Fuze/Rockbox until I can find this capability.

[andrewilley]

To the second part, you can scale any list view via (menu)=>List Options, or just use a pinch gesture to zoom in/out. The smallest view fits about 26 items in two columns (screen size dependent of course).

For the first part, please add your vote here (voting requires two days membership and at least two contributing posts):

Andre