Organize single tracks

[rockito]

Generally I have this organization of my music:
Genre - Album artist - Album By Release
This works fine, but I don't know what to do with single tracks.

I would like to see the single tracks of an artist (if there are also albums) in 'Album By Release' in a special category like 'single tracks'. If I define it as an album I can see it as one, but ordered by the year of the last song.
It would be nice to move it to the end without losing the year information of the single tracks.
Maybe it would be an alternative to distinguish between albums and single tracks after the album artist. (I already have created a custom tag). Then I would like to have a different organization for singles. Is this possible?

The second thing: Artists whose don't have albums should be seen at the level 'Album Artist' as Various Artists (but also with different organization of tags). Is this possible? Or with 'Album Artist' or 'No Album Artist' differentiation above?

I hope I was able to explain what I want to do.

[vilsen]

Re: Organize single tracks

You could make albums of your singles and then populate ALBUM SORT on all albums and singles to sort them all together chronologically. If you want the album(s) with singles sorted after the "real" albums you would set a higher "year" in ALBUM SORT.

1969 - Abbey Road
3000 - My singles

Then you'd browse by "Album" instead of "Album by Release". You would lose the alphabetical sorting when browsing by "Album" if you care about that.

[rockito]

Re: Organize single tracks

You could make albums of your singles and then populate ALBUM SORT on all albums and singles to sort them all together chronologically. If you want the album(s) with singles sorted after the "real" albums you would set a higher "year" in ALBUM SORT.

1969 - Abbey Road
3000 - My singles

Then you'd browse by "Album" instead of "Album by Release". You would lose the alphabetical sorting when browsing by "Album" if you care about that.

I understand. I think that will solve the problem with the singles of Album Artists!

In some genres I have many artists with only single tracks. Could I summarize them under 'Various Artists' (or a similar name, if this causes problems with compilations)?

[vilsen]

Re: Organize single tracks

Could I summarize them

Do you mean by creating custom compilation albums? That's no problem, there's no technical difference between them and commercial compilations. Asset will treat them the same.

You would tag COMPILATION=1 and ALBUMARTIST=Various Artists. To distinguish from commercial compilations you could use ALBUMARTIST=Compilation (or whatever) for your custom compilations, but there's no technical need for it.

Perhaps you could come up with themes to use as album names, e.g. ALBUM=British Pop or ALBUM=70's Rock

[simbun]

Re: Organize single tracks

The UPnP (and easiest/cleanest) way to do this would be to index on the tag you've created to distinguish the 2 types (Single/Album), so maybe change your drill hierarchy to:

Genre - Album artist - [Single/Album] - Album By Release

Or put the [Single/Album] index at the root if there are other drill hierarchies you use.


If you want to sort the single tracks by year in album view then there's not really any option other than to turn them into albums.
If you do want to combine them into a single album, maybe you could add the year to the track title, so - assuming they'll all be tagged with Track No 1 - they should sort by year within the "album".

preformat:=title:=[IFEQUALS][tag]releasetype[],Single,[year] - [][title]

Obviously Asset can't do the "if the single belongs to an album artist that doesn't have any albums" so that's down to you.

Whilst it would be nice to have groupings (not just through a sort) within the album list (Albums .., .. Singles .., ..) that's unfortunately not a thing in UPnP.

[vilsen]

Re: Organize single tracks

This obviously comes down to whether you want to list albums and singles simultaneously in the album view or if you'd rather split to separate listings.

"Album by Release" is hard coded to YEAR so a joint listing with singles at the end would require an erroneous YEAR tag.

Since it's Album by Release I wish there was a standard album based year tag that could be used instead, or custom tag. I recently made a request here.

[simbun]

Re: Organize single tracks

Since it's Album by Release I wish there was a standard album based year tag that could be used instead, or custom tag. I recently made a request here.

You could create a fake "album" listing by using a tag (with preformat) that's formatted the way you want it sorted e.g.[list order] - [album], but it's not the same and will be displayed differently to a normal album listing in your control point. I do however use this approach to group boxsets and series that then descend into albums.

[vilsen]

Re: Organize single tracks

but it's not the same and will be displayed differently to a normal album listing

Exactly. And I even tried to hijack and rename "Album by Release", but then I was forced to use ALBUM SORT for the chronological sorting which left me with no alphabetical or other sorting option. Hence my request for more "Album by ..." sorting possibilities.