Folder Hierachy support...

[Absinthequ]

My Feature Requests:
-Being able to see the year in the meta line.
-Being able to sort files differently than folders, or at least having the default secondary sorting to be filename rather than by title.
-Being able to see the tagged Artist or Album Artist under the sub folder name instead of the current folder you're in.

I'm looking for a way to clean this section up, suggestions are welcomed. There's two things that bother me that I think I've slightly touched on in other topics: Having to put the year in front of the folder, and having to put the artist name at the end of the folder name as well. This results in me barely being able to read what the album title is or who the artist is. I have to shrink the cover art down dramatically and got to landscape mode to read most of it.

 

I would love to sort by Year using the sorting option, but then the problem becomes when you actually go into an album, the songs are then sorted by title, rather than by filename. So now my album has the songs all scrambled out of order and folders with mixed artists are now scrambled by song title so the artist is ungrouped from the cluster of songs by them. Defaulting to title is extremely odd. I'm not sure while in song list we are forced to have the same sorting as the folders? If there had to be a default, sorting by filename makes more sense in a folder category. 

I would love to not put the artist name on the folder for each album also. The problem with this is: you see the current directory you are in listed under the folder name instead of the actual tagged artist name. That is also odd to see the folder I'm in listed under each folder inside of the folder. I can't think of any file exploring program I've ever used where you see the folder you're in, listed under each sub folder name. This gets confusing because I may have different group albums in one Artist folder. For example if I have a folder "Linkin Park", I may have Fort Minor, Dead By Sunrise, Grey Daze, Linkin Park, and solo Mike Shinoda or Chester Benngiton albums in there and under each album it will simply say "Linkin Park". Another reason "Show Titles Only" was a good feature to add. It helped remove that confusion, but I still have to add the artist for the album in the folder name to try to see the differences before clicking into the album/folder.

 

[andrewilley]

Song files and further subfolders can exist in any mixed combination at any level (it's just a directory tree) so they have to use a common sorting method while you drill down. However there is a slightly obscurely named feature called Hierarchy Files Zoom Level in Settings > Library > Lists which allows you to assign different List Option values (such as view and sort order) for directory levels which contain only song files (i.e. no further nested subfolders). It's actually the same set of options that you see for the songs level in the plain 'Folders' view. I think that should allow you to do what you want. 

Directories / folders don't have dates or any other musical tags associated with them - apart from the file-system creation date for the folder, but that's probably not what you want here. So if you use the 'Years' sort order for folder levels, only any songs at those levels will get sorted by year tags, subfolders won't as they don't have tags.

When you view folders, the displayed name will be the folder name along with any parent folder name. That's the point of that category, it's basically a directory tree just like viewing files/folders on your PC. So the best way to handle what you want would be to not have mixed contents inside one artist's main directory - unless it's a miscellaneous kind of directory, such as one just for assorted Singles for example.

I do the same as what you appear to have done by the way, I prefix any folder names that I want to sort with the relevant four digits for the year. I also prefix song files with zero-padded track numbers where applicable. Then I use path/filename sorting.

Andre

[Absinthequ]

2 hours ago, andrewilley said:

Song files and further subfolders can exist in any mixed combination at any level (it's just a directory tree) so they have to use a common sorting method while you drill down. However there is a slightly obscurely named feature called Hierarchy Files Zoom Level in Settings > Library > Lists which allows you to assign different List Option values (such as view and sort order) for directory levels which contain only song files (i.e. no further nested subfolders). It's actually the same set of options that you see for the songs level in the plain 'Folders' view. I think that should allow you to do what you want. 

I can't actually get this to work. I have the Hierarchy Files Zoom Level setting on.

My structure is basically:

Root/
   Alternative/
      N/
         Nine Inch Nails/
            The Downward Spiral/
               05 Closer.flac
               14 Hurt.flac

I've tried setting "sort by year" in "Nine Inch Nails" and then click into "The Downward Spiral" where I just see the song list/flacs and then choose "sort by filename". Then when I back out, every single section is now set to "sort by filename". I've tried this with each folder from the root down and once I change any of them back to "sort by year"and go back to the song list I'm back at "sort by year". It's universally locked in. Not sure if this is broken on my device or I'm missing something.

[andrewilley]

I think you may have stumbled on a bug. The List Options > View As (the choice of grid/list and sizes) correctly isolates the settings for folders that contain only files versus folders that also contain subfolders. If you change from Grid to List in a files-only view, it does not change the view used for folders, as expected. However the Sort Order appears not to separate the two, and changing one changes the other also, even with the Hierarchy Files Zoom Level enabled. @maxmp could you check on this please? Thanks. 

Andre