My Music Collection Sorting Question

[coblesan]

I have been looking for this particular answer for a while. When sorting your music collection, it is possible to sort on two columns at the same time. I would like to sort My Music Collection first by Artist and then by Album. Right now I can either sort by only one field. If I sort by Artist, all tracks are sorted automatically. If I sort by Album, the artist field is no longer sorted and you have to scroll down to find each Artist entry (if you have more that one album by that Artist).

Thanks in advance for your help.

Mike

[xoas]

Re: My Music Collection Sorting Question

Your best bet is to set your display preferences to arrange and display your tracks in hat order.
Open MMC, click on Collection, select Preferences. Rearrange the priorities of the fields so that Icon remains 1, Artist 2, Album 3, track number 4 (if you want to keep tracks in the same order as they are on their albums), track (if you don't care about keeping album order make this 4) and rearrange the priorities of the other fields to suit your purposes.
At present, I don't think there is any other way to sort by more than one field in MMC.
Preferences does have a feature that allows you to restore your preferences to the default setting.

Hope this helps.

Best wishes,
Bill

[dbample]

Re: My Music Collection Sorting Question

At present, I don't think there is any other way to sort by more than one field in MMC.

Maybe I misundertstood something about the original poster's querstion, but there is a way to sort by a second field. It is in the Collection->Preferences window. There is a pull-down sub-menu there called "Collection 2nd Sort". Typically it would be set to "Smart".

You could change this to explicitly read "Album". Then go back to the collection and do a sort by Artist. You should see that additionally a second sort was done by album. (Or you could alternatively force a 2nd sort by Artist and then go back and sort by Album though it would probably not be as useful to you as the Artist->Album sort).

The only drawback is that you do not see what the setting is at any time, so you might forget you made it to force a 2nd sort by Album, and [days] later on another occasion you might wonder why it is sorting in a weird way.

BTW, sorting "Smart" is a set of presets, i.e. particular pairs of 1st and 2nd sort. Here's what I think "Smart" presets are, depending on what you sorted by first:

If you sorted by:

A. Artist, then 2nd sort is by Track {name)

B. Track, then 2nd sort is by Artist

C. Genre, then 2nd sort is by Artist

D. Album, then 2nd sort is by Track number

E. Preferences, then 2nd sort is by Artist

Obviously in your case you want a modified "A" preset so you do Artist->Album, or a modified "D" preset so you do Album->Artist. You achieve this by forcing the 2nd sort through the "Collection 2nd sort" pulldown menu.

[xoas]

Re: My Music Collection Sorting Question

Thank you for pointing this out!

Best wishes,
Bill