'Album Artists' view added (2 Viewers)

[Koudijs]

Starting from svn build 15992 there is an Album Artists view available.
This view makes use of the albumartist tag within music files.
This is a standard tag for wma, for mp3 the TPE2 tag is used (id3v2) and for flac the vorbis comment ALBUMARTIST.

The MP tagreader supported this tag already but it was not stored in the database, so the database layout had to be changed.
The first time you start MP your database will be automatically converted to the new layout.
After this conversion your music views will look the same as before and the Album Artists view is the same as the Artists view.
If you want to make use of the new view you have to rescan your complete music collection first, after that you can start making use of it.

The Album Artists view is usefull if your collection has albums with various artists, it avoids artists with just one song and it keeps the songs of an album together.

Example:
I have a live album 'The Wall - Live in Berlin' by Roger Waters.
On this album there are different guest performances, so there are songs performed by Roger Waters but there are also songs performed by The Scorpions, Brian Adams etc.
The albumartist tag of this album is set to Roger Waters.

When you use the Artists view you get different entries for all the performing artists.
When you use the Album Artists view you get one entry, just Roger Waters.
Within this entry you will get an entry for the album and after that all tracks of the album, the songs are no longer scattered around.

The screenshots show the results I get on a small collection (33 albums, 3 with various artists):
1) The list with artists in the Artists view (63)
2) The list with artists in the Album Artists view (26)
3) The number of tracks within the live album in the Artists view (9 of 26)
4) The number of tracks within the live album in the Album Artists view (26 of 26)

Let me know how it works for you.


Regards,
Jan

 

[Koudijs]

The Album Artists view is not directly available after running the svn installer.

To solve this you can:
- Delete the MusicViews.xml file in the root directory of your MediaPortal installation.
When starting MP again this file will be recreated and includes the new view.
- Manually create the view in the Music->Music Views tab within configuration.exe.
The screenshot shows an example of the view.

Regards,
Jan

 

[rockmeisster]

Like this view alot. Makes all the tagging worth the while

But i cant figure out how you get a complete list of all artists. When i use the view i get at view where all artists starting with a is grouped, and all artists starting with b is grouped, and so on.

How did you disable this grouping?

Aaaah... Figured it out! Just had to remove "group limit 1" line from the view in the config tool. The view setup in the config tool is starting to make sense now

 

[Koudijs]

Hi rockmeisster,

The views in the screenshots are not what you get by default.
I indeed removed the group line in the view configuration as you found out already.

Regards,
Jan

 

[Spragleknas]

Cool.
Now we only need the Album-view implemented everywhere (see signature)