Plan for sorting albums by year

[InTheBath]

Hi,

I'd like to outline my plans before I start a tagging project, as somebody more experienced than me may be able to save me some time...

Background:
I have a large library of flac and mp3 files. Tags have been carefully cleaned. Each track has a YEAR tag.
SB currently sorts the albums within an artist by year, but that year is the first/last track scanned from the album, so compilations and albums with earlier/later bonus tracks aren't always sorted in the right order.

Plan:
Populate the ALBUMSORT tag with an album level year, to force SB to put the album where I want it.
For many albums, picking the year from track 1 on the album is probably what I'll do. For various artist albums, I'll probably go for the highest year on the compilation.

Outcome:
For most artists, I'll get the albums in the order I want straight off the bat.
For artists who don't realise that one album a year is enough (Costello, Fairport, Davis) I may have to change the album sort on three albums from 1969, 1969, 1969 to 1969a, 1969b, 1969c.

Please shoot this plan down in flames in any way you'd like. The more comments the better before I start tryingit out.

Thanks,

M.

[aubuti]

Given your setup of many albums with different years on different tracks what you're proposing makes sense. How are you planning to populate the ALBUMSORT tag, (semi-)automated with a tool like mp3tag "actions" or manually? The former could possibly save you a lot of time, although I'm not sure if any tagging tools are capable of your particular wishes, especially applying the earliest or latest year to ALBUMSORT for all tracks on an album.

Another alternative for dealing with those who put out more than one album per year is to use YYYYMM (where MM is the 0-padded month of release in year YYYY) instead of YYYYa, YYYYb, YYYYc, etc. It could save you some extra tag editing if you acquire the "middle" album later on. Of course, YYYYMMM wouldn't work if the artist released two albums in the same month!

[JJZolx]

That sounds like a thorough plan. It should work fine.

One thing to know, though, is that this will preclude your ability to sort albums by album name.

[JezA]

Hang on! Hold it! Stay where you are! Don't jump!

Install the (superb) Custom Browse plug in: Settings > Plug ins > Tick the Custom Browse Box > Apply.

This lets you configure as many new browse trees as you wish, structured and filtered in pretty much any way you fancy, so you should be able to get the result you want without disturbing the squeezecenter menus, or hijacking or adding tags.

[InTheBath]

Thanks for the quick replies.

I was thinking of using JRiver for the tagging. I'm pretty sure I can get a max year by album from that, and also copy a tag from one track (year of track one) to the other tracks on the album. Doing it manually would be a drag.

I've looked at CustomBrowse briefly before but always shied away as it looked like it would take a bit of work to set up and we're already very happy with the menus available on the controller.
In any case, I'm not sure the meta-data I need for sorting by year is really in a usable format - I want to use the year from track one on a single artist album and the max year on the album for compilations. Can CustomBrowse really do this?

At the moment, I'm thinking that it would take me as long to work out how to do what I want in CustomBrowse as it would to do the tagging operation. However, I'm sure the former option would have other knock-on benefits.

Thanks agtain for all the quick replies!

M.

[gerph]

Sounds like a reasonable solution to me - if you accept that browsing by Album will then list by year order as well as browsing Artist->album sorting by year.

But also, don't forget to vote for bug#112 and maybe one day this sort of hackery will be unnecessary.

[Tony T]

Populate the ALBUMSORT tag with an album level year, to force SB to put the album where I want it.
For most artists, I'll get the albums in the order I want straight off the bat.
For artists who don't realise that one album a year is enough (Costello, Fairport, Davis) I may have to change the album sort on three albums from 1969, 1969, 1969 to 1969a, 1969b, 1969c.

That's what I did. I have all my Music in FLAC, so I used a script and MetaFlac to create the ALBUMSORT tag from the date in the DATE tag. For artists with more than one release in a year, I used a decimal system (i.e. 1969.02.12), but 1969a,1969b should also work just fine.

[erland]

I've looked at CustomBrowse briefly before but always shied away as it looked like it would take a bit of work to set up and we're already very happy with the menus available on the controller.
In any case, I'm not sure the meta-data I need for sorting by year is really in a usable format - I want to use the year from track one on a single artist album and the max year on the album for compilations. Can CustomBrowse really do this?

There isn't any template for it, so you would have to customize the SQL manually. If you customize the SQL you could sort compilations differently than normal albums but if you want to sort two normal albums differently it's going to get moreI complicated.

Anyway, unless you are good at SQL I suspect it's easier to just adjust the ALBUMSORT tagging.

[TimothyB]

InTheBath, I did the same thing as you, including the abc addition when an artist has multiple albums in a year. ("Fly by Night" *must* sort before "Caress of Steel"!)

If you are going to the trouble of adding ALBUMSORT tags, you might want to consider adding ARTISTSORT, too. For example, I prefer to have Michael Hedges sorted under 'H' not 'M'.

-- T

[InTheBath]

The plan worked. Thanks for all your comments.

I still need to get it sorted on iPeng, but will move that discussion to the relevant thread.

Had a bit of fiddling with a few artists. Nina Simone was way too prolific for her own good!

Thanks for the tip on Artistsort, but I already had those tags.

Took the opportunity to move all my composer tags to xcomposer so that SB doesn't use them. This has cleared up my menus significantly as well. I can't think what the next tweak will be. Maybe it's time to start thinking about sorting my genres...

Cheers again,

M.