Custom Browse Menu - No Alphabetical Sorting In Albums Sub-Menus

[kiwibrucie]

Probably this question is primarily addressed to Erland as it involves one of his plug-ins.

I really like the Custom Browse function but I find it particularly problematic that The Albums And New Albums sub-menus do not sort alphabetically. All the albums are grouped in pages of 50, each page numbered 1,2,3 etc. This is hopeless for navigating around a large collection like mine and virtually renders the functions useless. This occurs on both the PC web interface and Ipeng.

I would really appreciate a fix for this if at all possible.

Cheers........................ Bruce.

[onimod]

Sort order:
Settings > Advanced > Custom Browse > Manage Menus > Default album sorting
There is also a sort order button at the bottom left of the web interface but I'm pretty sure this defers to the above setting upon a refresh.

Albums per page:
Settings > Advanced > Interface > Items Per Page

[pippin]

I don't think you can sort "New Albums" alphabetically in CustomBrowse. It also makes no sense since the only difference between "New Albums" and "Albums" in CB is the sorting.
"New Albums" gives you all Albums sorted reversely by the date they were added to your library.

Alphabetical ordering only works if the Albums are sorted by album title.
There's supposed to be a way to also make a CustomBrowse menu sort alphabetically by other criteria creating a textkey (at least for iPeng) but this doesn't seem to work for the default Albums menu.

BTW: The setting is in "Settings > Advanced > Custom Browse > Manage Menus > Albums > Default album sorting" and you have to press "proceed" instead of "Apply" to make it work.

[kiwibrucie]

Thanks for the advice guys.

@ Onimod : Does alphabetical ordering on artist actually work for you with "default ordering by artist" set in "custom browse/album" menu management.......it certainly doesn't for me? I know it works with "default ordering by Title".

@ Pippin : 1/. Do you mean the "next" button when you say "proceed"? I don't see any "proceed" button in the menu management options. If you do it doesn't work for me as you have outlined and I still get no alphabetical ordering on the web interface or Ipeng. 2/. When you say "Alphabetical ordering only works if the Albums are sorted by album title"........there is definitely an option in the menu management structure to sort by Artist so I would believe that was Erlands intention when the plug-in was written. It is an essential requirement for the functionality of the plug-in and if it is broken it needs to be fixed in my opinion as a paying subscriber to the service. 3/ You're right about the "New Album" menu it doesn't have a sort on Artist option. It probably isn't necessary for most people, I would have found it useful for my purposes but not essential like the "Album" menu sort on artist facility.

Once again thanks for your assistance, hopefully someone, maybe the "Creator", can provide a fix :-) Cheers ........ Bruce.

[erland]

@ Onimod : Does alphabetical ordering on artist actually work for you with "default ordering by artist" set in "custom browse/album" menu management.......it certainly doesn't for me? I know it works with "default ordering by Title".

"Sort by artist" means sort by ARTISTSORT tags (or ARTIST tags if ARTISTSORT tags doesn't exist), this could result in inconsistent sorting if some tracks have ARTISTSORT tags which are ordered by the last name of the artist and some doesn't have ARTISTSORT tags at all and due to this probably orded by the first name of the artist. Does the artist sorting looks correct in the standard "My Music/Artists" menu ?
The "Sort by artist" option in Custom Browse definitely works in my own setup.

@ Pippin : 1/. Do you mean the "next" button when you say "proceed"? I don't see any "proceed" button in the menu management options. If you do it doesn't work for me as you have outlined and I still get no alphabetical ordering on the web interface or Ipeng.

He meant the "Next" button.

2/. When you say "Alphabetical ordering only works if the Albums are sorted by album title"........there is definitely an option in the menu management structure to sort by Artist so I would believe that was Erlands intention when the plug-in was written. It is an essential requirement for the functionality of the plug-in and if it is broken it needs to be fixed in my opinion as a paying subscriber to the service.

It works in the web interface but it produce 1-10 links on the top instead of A-Z links.
In iPeng it also works but it doesn't provide any alphabetic bar on the right side, just dots to navigate to the next 25 albums.

I guess it can be considered a bug that the alpha bar is numeric, it's actually designed this way because I thought it was a bit strange to have letters that select artists in the albums menu, but when looking at the standard menu I now see that it works this way so I should probably see if I can adjust Custom Browse to work the same way. It's a small change as I just need to modify the menu templates a bit, so I'll try to include this in the next Custom Browse release.

3/ You're right about the "New Album" menu it doesn't have a sort on Artist option. It probably isn't necessary for most people, I would have found it useful for my purposes but not essential like the "Album" menu sort on artist facility.

There is a difference between the "New Music" menu in standard SBS and the "New Albums" menu in Custom Browse, the difference is that the Custom Browse menu lists all albums in the complete library while the standard SBS/LMS menu only lists the last 100 albums (or something similar).

In the SBS/LMS case I can agree with you that it makes some sense to look at it as new albums and you want to be able to find new albums by album title or even artist name. However, in the Custom Browse case, it results in exactly the same menu behavior as the standard Custom Browse Albums menu, so it doesn't make much sense.

If you like a Custom Browse menu that works the same as SBS/LMS menu but is sorted by artist, you can accomplish that the following way:
1. Install Multi Library plugin and create a library that only contains new music (unfortunately you have to create the SQL yourself at the moment because there isn't any template to do this)
2. In Custom Browse create a new menu based on the "Filtered Albums" template and select the library from point 1 in the "Library" parameter and select to sort it and name it as you like.

If this would be of interest, let me know and I'll create a template for point 1 to make it a bit easier to create this kind of setup.

[kiwibrucie]

Hi Erland, thanks for your response.

You wrote above:


"It works in the web interface but it produce 1-10 links on the top instead of A-Z links.
In iPeng it also works but it doesn't provide any alphabetic bar on the right side, just dots to navigate to the next 25 albums.

I guess it can be considered a bug that the alpha bar is numeric, it's actually designed this way because I thought it was a bit strange to have letters that select artists in the albums menu, but when looking at the standard menu I now see that it works this way so I should probably see if I can adjust Custom Browse to work the same way. It's a small change as I just need to modify the menu templates a bit, so I'll try to include this in the next Custom Browse release."


That in a nut shell is my problem. I don't want to navigate by numbers with thousands of albums, it's a feature that I can't see the point of. I need to be able to navigate alphabetically by artist the same as the standard menu, but I require the additional features/functionality of your add-on which leaves the standard menu options in the dust!!

If you could modify the custom browse menu setting template, as you say above, to achieve this so I can sort by artist alphabetically on the PC web interface and Ipeng, I would be extremely happy!! :-) :-)

Cheers.................. Bruce.

[pippin]

@ Pippin : 1/. Do you mean the "next" button when you say "proceed"?

Yes, sorry. I mean "next".
I was looking at the German interface where it is "weiter".

3/ You're right about the "New Album" menu it doesn't have a sort on Artist option. It probably isn't necessary for most people, I would have found it useful for my purposes but not essential like the "Album" menu sort on artist facility.

No, you will not find it useful.
It will get you the exact same result as the "Albums, sorted by Artist" menu so it would be redundant