Folder View Options

[Ash Roarshock]

I like to use FOLDER view for certain navigating, but currently there is two things that are making it confusing:

First, I would like to sort FOLDERS and FILES differently. It seems Poweramp only allows you to choose one sort option and that is applied to all folders and files, and then Poweramp sorts by title. For me, it would just be really nice if you could actually sort FOLDERS by "Year" and then sort FILES by "Filename". Currently if you change the sort method to anything else (Example: "Sort by Year") your albums will be in the correct order, but then it sorts your songs by title (which results in all of your songs being out of order in each album). If you choose sort by "Filename", to get your songs in the right order, then it sorts your albums by folder name, causing them to be out of order unless you use the most primitive folder structure: "(YEAR) Album Title" and the end result is most of the title is cut off, unless you view on your phone in landscape mode or you sacrifice the artwork. It seems "Sort by Filename" is the only usable option to not cause random sorting somewhere else, due to the lack of being able to sort FOLDERS and FILES differently.

Second, it would be nice if you could use "Compact List view" to remove ONLY the parent FOLDER info and not the Artist info for FILES. Currently it removes both. If you have a folder for a band (Example: Blink-182), within that folder you would have albums by 'Blink-182", "Travis Barker", "Angels & Airwaves", "Box Car Racer", "+44" and "Tom Delonge". This is an example of my very simple structure:

Blink-182/
   (2002) Box Car Racer - Box Car Racer/
   (2004) Take Off Your Pants And Jacket - Blink-182/
   (2006) We Don't Need To Whisper - Angels & Airwaves/
   (2006) When Your Heart Stops Beating - +44/
   (2011) Give The Drummer Some - Travis Barker/
   (2012) Stomping The Phantom Brake Pedal - Angels & Airwaves/
   (2015) To the Stars... Demos, Odds and Ends - Tom Delonge/

and in Poweramp, this is what it looks like:

(2012) Stomping The Phantom Brake Pedal - Angels & Airwaves [some of this gets Cut-Off Screen if album art is present, if you remove the 'Angels & Airwaves' then the parent folder info below it makes this very confusing]
Blink-182 [Parent Folder, which shouldn't be here for this album]

To correct that Parent folder info, you would have to completely splice the structure (removing all constructiveness) and bounce back and forth to see the albums broken into small pieces:

Blink-182/
   +44/
      (2006) When Your Heart Stops Beating/
   Angels & Airwaves/
      (2006) We Don't Need To Whisper/
      (2012) Stomping The Phantom Brake Pedal/
   Blink-182/
      (2004) Take Off Your Pants And Jacket/
   Box Car Racer/
      (2002) Box Car Racer/
   Tom Delonge/
         (2015) To the Stars... Demos, Odds and Ends/
   Travis Barker/
      (2011) Give The Drummer Some/

Maybe if you had a very simple library with only one artist per folder, seeing parent folder wouldn't bother you, but at that point, you should know you're looking at an album list of that one artist and the info is irrelevant. But you almost always need to see the artist info in files: Even if you had zero songs with multiple artists, If you navigate to a folder that has multiple files by different artists, seeing just song titles would be tough to discern songs.

[andrewilley]

6 hours ago, Ash Roarshock said:

First, I would like to sort FOLDERS and FILES differently.

You can, but there is a caveat:

If you are using regular Folders mode, it's simple as there is a clear distinction between the overall list of folder names, and the drilled-down list of contained files. You can set the List Options for both levels separately.

However in Folders Hierarchy mode, that distinction between levels blurs as any folder can contain any mixture of folders and files, so how do you define which sorting method to use in which cases? There is an option that forces the use the file-level sorting option (the same one from the drill-down list in Folders view mentioned above) for any cases where every item inside a given folder is a file - i.e. there are no further subfolder levels present. Go to Settings > Library > Lists and enable Hierarchy Files Zoom Level.

Folder views show only sub-folder and parent-folder information - they doesn't care about tags, such as Artist or Album, at all, and you can use whatever naming scheme you like for folder names. It's only when you get down to seeing actual MP3/FLAC/etc song files that the normal tag-based display of Song Title / Track Artist / Album Title kicks in. Currently the second line can only be shown as the fixed scheme "Artist - Album", or be hidden completely. There have been requests to allow custom formatting strings for those lines - such as using "%album% - %artist%" for example - but that hasn't been implemented as yet. For more discussion about that, see this thread: 

 

Andre

[Ash Roarshock]

1 hour ago, andrewilley said:

 Go to Settings > Library > Lists and enable Hierarchy Files Zoom Level. 

 

I'm not sure what this actually does? On my device there is no change at all in folder hierarchy, whether it's on or off. ?

alternative/b/blink-182/(2004) Take Off Your Pants And Jacket - Blink-182/01 anthem part two.mp3

I can set any of those levels of folders to year and when I go back the files are also on year. I change the sort back to filename while I'm looking at the files and now all of the folders are changed also all of the way back to root.

I would think Poweramp could discern between folders and files and sort them differently. If there is sub folders within a folder Poweramp would ignore custom sorting and use name sorting like it currently does. Only the bottom folder with files could sort custom. It works like that now, however it changes the files also.

 

[andrewilley]

37 minutes ago, Ash Roarshock said:

Only the bottom folder with files could sort custom. It works like that now, however it changes the files also.

 

In Folders Heirarchy, there is no such thing as the "bottom folder with files". Any folder can have any combination of files and subfolder contents, depending entirely on how the user sets up their folder structure.

With that extra setting enabled, any Folders Heirarchy level that only includes files and no subfolders will use the file level List Options from the regular Folders category.

Andre

[MotleyG]

@Ash Roarshock This is just a suggestion, your preference may dictate otherwise. But you seem to have most of the info you need for tagging your files right in your existing folder and file names. If you haven’t already done so, why not use a tagging program to pull this data in the appropriate tags. This will let music player apps including Poweramp manage your library far more effectively. The folder browsing method is ok for legacy browsing, but sorting by AlbumArtist, Album, Song, Artist, Composer, Genre, Year, etc. is much more advanced when the metadata tags are used instead. When Poweramp runs a Full Rescan, it is the tag data from each file that is used to populate the library database.

[Ash Roarshock]

This still didn't appear to do anything. In folders I set folders view to "sort by date added" and chose " reverse" then files I did the same. I moved over to hierarchy and everything is still sorted by "filename". All of my files are in folders where no other folders exist.

Regardless this wouldn't really solve either of my requests because you don't have the ability to sort folders by year or anything useful. You're stuck with OS structure sorting name/path/date/# of files

[MotleyG]

3 minutes ago, Ash Roarshock said:

This still didn't appear to do anything. In folders I set folders view to "sort by date added" and chose " reverse" then files I did the same. I moved over to hierarchy and everything is still sorted by "filename". All of my files are in folders where no other folders exist.

Regardless this wouldn't really solve either of my requests because you don't have the ability to sort folders by year or anything useful. You're stuck with OS structure sorting name/path/date/# of files

Folders don’t have any year info, and you can’t assume that numbers in a file name are year, disc, or track numbers. This could conflict with Artist, Album, or even Song names. As I mentioned above, folder/file browsing is limited to exactly that - using the structure your files have been created with. For more accurate library browsing, I can only suggest you update your tags and browse that way.

[Ash Roarshock]

4 minutes ago, MotleyG said:

Folders don’t have any year info, and you can’t assume that numbers in a file name are year, disc, or track numbers. This could conflict with Artist, Album, or even Song names. As I mentioned above, folder/file browsing is limited to exactly that - using the structure your files have been created with. For more accurate library browsing, I can only suggest you update your tags and browse that way.

I Do. Most of the time I use artist to browse music. I only use folder view of I'm trying to look at ONLY albums by that artist(s). For example if I go to blink-182 in my Artist category, I see 39 albums. This is because I'm utilizing multiple artists tags and I'm seeing all albums they appear on. Even an album where they are only on one song as a guest. The only way to see just blink 182 albums (including all of the side projects) is to go to folders view. Then I see 17 folders (albums). 

There's just no good way to group specific albums and still see the correct tags other than genre and folders. It really muddies up the genre section though. It would be nice if there was a favorites category, where you could group any albums together and name them. Like a playlist at the album sorting level rather than song level. Maybe that would be a better solution than trying to advance the folder view.

[andrewilley]

8 hours ago, Ash Roarshock said:

The only way to see just blink 182 albums (including all of the side projects) is to go to folders view. Then I see 17 folders (albums). 

You could also use the 'Album Artists' Library Category - assuming all of your full Blink 182 albums have "Blink 182" listed in their Album Artist tag anyway.

I've just checked the sorting method for file-only subfolder levels within Folders Heirarchy, and it doesn't seem to be behaving quite as I would have expected. With 'Hierarchy Files Zoom Level' enabled, any file-only subfolders should be sorted by whatever sorting method you use for the file level in regular Folders mode. But you're right that it still seems to be using the overall Folders Hierarchy sorting order.  @maxmp could you have a look at that when you get a chance? Thanks.

Andre

[andrewilley]

For what it's worth by the way, I always set both my folder and files sorting levels to "By Path". I use numeric track# or year prefixes with both folder names and song filenames in order to control the order precisely as I want it.

Andre

[MotleyG]

2 hours ago, andrewilley said:

You could also use the 'Album Artists' Library Category - assuming all of your full Blink 182 albums have "Blink 182" listed in their Album Artist tag anyway.

You may have to enable the AlbumArtist category, I don’t think it is on by default. But I could be wrong. I have had it on for years.

[andrewilley]

7 hours ago, MotleyG said:

You may have to enable the AlbumArtist category, I don’t think it is on by default. 

Forgot to mention that, yes that might be one of the extra categories that is not shown by default to help declutter the list.

At the top level library view, tap the three-dots menu icon and select 'List Options'. Make sure 'Album Artists' is ticked in the resulting show/hide list.

Andre

[dez93_2000]

Hi chaps, related to this, is it possible to have different sort options for certain folders?

I have folders hierarchy:

/A/A artists/Albums/song
/B/
...
/S/
/Singles/Ambient/
/Singles/BossaNova/
...
/T/
etc

For all folders I want sort to be "disc #, track #"

Except /Singles/ which I want to be "Artist, TrackName".

Is that possible? Based on Andre's comment about 'Hierarchy Files Zoom Level' above, it seems like you can set sort options for Folders differently to Folders Hierarchy?

Thanks!

[andrewilley]

Folders Hierarchy only offers one set of sorting options which is used for all drill-down layers as it does not place any distinction between a 'folders only' layer and a 'songs list' layer. Each new drill-down layer is the same in that they could all contain sub-folders, song files, or a mixture of both.

Folders is very different in that it acts more like the other Categories, and has two distinct layers: the top one shows only folder names, and when you drill down into them you get a second layer containing only songs. Thus there are two distinct sets of List Options - just like Albums offers different sorting options at the album name level to the options it offers at the tracks level.

For that reason I use path/filename as my sort order for my Folders Hierarchy and Folders views, allowing me to control different layers individually just by the way I name the folders and files - e.g. album tracks have track numbers at the start of their filename, whereas Singles commence with the track title.

However I do agree it might be nice if each separate folder/subfolder could be assigned its own set of sort order List Options, in the same way that you can currently assign individual List Memory features for each different folder. It would also be very helpful to have a tickbox for 'apply setting to sub-folders too'.

Andre

[dez93_2000]

Fantastic, thanks for this Andre. Sorry for the slow reply - had this tab open forever, until I finally had the mental bandwidth to really process it!

So in my example, where I use Folders Heirarchy prettymuch all the time, for /Singles, e.g. /Singles/Deep House, I can't have a different sort order, but I CAN instead goto Folders/Deep House, and set the Folders sort order to Filename, or Artist (both seem to be the same since I name my files "Artist - Title.mp3").

Cheers pal!

[andrewilley]

On 8/26/2022 at 5:28 AM, dez93_2000 said:

So in my example, where I use Folders Heirarchy prettymuch all the time, for /Singles, e.g. /Singles/Deep House, I can't have a different sort order, but I CAN instead goto Folders/Deep House, and set the Folders sort order to Filename, or Artist (both seem to be the same since I name my files "Artist - Title.mp3").

 

Correct. In Folders Hierarchy, every drill-down level has the same sort settings, as there is no such thing as a 'folders-only' or 'files-only' layer - any level could contain subfolders and/or files, so they are all treated identically. Folders do not have Artist, Album, Duration, Track#, etc details so those sorting options cannot be used to sort folder-based layers. However in plain Folders mode, one layer contains only a flattened list of folder names (with folder-bases sorting options) and the second layer contains only song files, so the two levels can have different sorting options.

Andre