Artist as top level in music database

[Colby]

Steve thanks for taking all the credit on this,
http://www.xlobby.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=9747#9747
I suggested adding thumbnails support to filters lists since, this is practically the same thing as hiarchal folders view. Here is how it works, when you do a search in the music category you can type in the name of an artist and the filter will show a list of that artists albums by default it will show all the artist. What steve did was make the lists enable thumbnails thus showing one pic per artist. When you select that artist the music will be filtered to all the albums with that artist. So if you have all 11 Pearl Jam albums, upon clicking the pearl jam thumb all 11 will be revealed. Kinda a folder hiearchy thing. The difference here is that if Pearl Jam is on any other albums those albums will appear also. This is because its not truely navigating directories, but sorting by artists in the id3 tag. Small price to pay. So If you want to set this up you set the default filter for the music filter results to artist then click the category tab and enable thumbnail view.
There are still some bugs with this. Nothing is ever perfect.

[stevenhanna6]

finally got a chance to add the new import option guys, please test with this exe

http://www.xlobby.com/xlobby2.zip

you'll have to edit the "music" import template and select what kind of view you want, the options are genre>artist>album, artist>album, artist. Do a fresh import, delete your db first.

Hopefully some people still wanted this.

[antipasto]

this is the greatest thing since someone invented that proverb about sliced bread.

[stevenhanna6]

so its working I take it

[archerkit]

Steve - almost! (for me anyway) I wanted something very similar to this, as I indicated here, and this nearly does it.

But -
1. How do you get "up" to view all artists, once you've opened an artist? (so if I see all my Frank Sinatra albums, how do I get up to see the rest?)
2. What I *really* want is a blend of the id3 and custom-container import.

If I do the custom-container import, then I get exactly what I want on the top screen (except the cover art, I think I have to put a jpg in the root of the folder) but then since its not reading id3 tags, none of the tracks have names. (they're just indicated by dashes)

Know what I mean? It's SO CLOSE to being perfect..!!

[stevenhanna6]

1. How do you get "up" to view all artists, once you've opened an artist? (so if I see all my Frank Sinatra albums, how do I get up to see the rest?)

you'll need to make your own back button, there is one in the movies section you can look at that to see how to do it.

What I *really* want is a blend of the id3 and custom-container import.

replied on the thread you quoted.

I also uploaded a new zip file, the other one had a bug

http://www.xlobby.com/xlobby2.zip

[smutle]

Hello!

i am absolutely new (installed xlobby yesterday, also on my pocket pc) and let me say: THATS GREAT - thanks alot for this piece of software!

I have one problem at the moment:
My music database is also of the kind Genre>Artist>Track and I tried to manage to import this with the help of this topic. But I did not find how to maintain the import template. My template looks like this at the moment:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
- <import>
<extentions>mp3,wav,ape,wma</extentions>
<coverart>jpg,jpeg,bmp,gif</coverart>
<folderitem>ignore</folderitem>
<options type="id3" />
</import>

So can you please help me how to maintain this?

thanks a lot in advance!

smutle

[saillard]

I love this new option to sort by genre>artist>album, artist>album, artist.
I would really like to see genre>album added to the list of options.
For a lot of people 2 levels is easier to navigate, no need to create Back button (can use the Reset button). In addition, even with a large DB, there is usually a lot of Artist with only one Album.
Thanks,

[spring85]

Can you give us the exact details of what to change? If it was that easy, I figure that the 100 or so people who have been trying to get this to work would have found it.

I think that that is a brilliant idea.

[Russell]

Is there anyway to not pick up a picture for teh top level of Artist. I would like to have the artist's name for level 1 and then the cover art for level 2. I could delete the image for level 1, but every time you refresh the database it adds the image again.

If it must have an image how about making a collage of the albums by the associated artist.