'Tracks' field name for filtering in Smart View not working? [SOLVED]

[muel2002]

Simple request for help, I can't seem to filter my Media Library according to the number of tracks on an album.

I've got a lot of tracks which are the only ones that come from a particular album. What I want to do is filter these out so I can just see the full albums that I have.




Just to make it absolutely clear as to what I am doing, here is the process I go through:


1
I've gone to 'add smart view' by right clicking on 'local media' at the top of the left column section of the media library window.

2
Then within the 'Smart View Creation Dialog' I select 'custom' in the 'choose a present' drop down menu.

3
click on the '+' button within the top section.

4
then from the drop down menus that appear select 'tracks' for the field name, 'is above' and then enter '1' in the text field.

5
In the bottom section for the filter I select the toggle for 'two'.

6
Finally I give the new view a name and click on 'OK'




When I look at the media libray the top two sections ('Artist' and 'albums' are still showing all the albums with only 1 tracks listed under them!

What stupid thing am I doing wrong, misinterpreting or not considering? Is the 'tracks' function supposed to do what I think it's supposed to do, or does filtering under the 'tracks' field name simply not work? Does it work for you?

[muel2002]

This post / thread is actually being posted in place of what was meant to be a reply to a thread I started earlier. For some reason, it is not here anymore. I either managed not to post it properly or it got deleted for some reason.

Anyway . . .

I was trying to use Smart View to filter the enteries in the Media Library according to the number of tracks existing under an Album name. I didn't want Albums to be displayed where a file had only used that Album name once. To try and achieve this I used the 'Tracks' field name in Smart View and set the variables to 'is above' and '1'.

I didn't take a proper look at what was going on in the Media Library list.

It did do something, just not what I was hoping for or was expecting.

It seems that this filter option will only include in its results files which have id3v2 entries (not id3v1), which allow you to add data for the total amount of tracks for that album in the 'Track #' field. For example '05/10' (meaning track 5 of 10) will be included in the filtered results but not '05'.


If this has helped you in anyway, please post a reply to let me know it has been worthwhile me writting this and that there is a chance it will be worthwhile doing something similar in the future.

[Spenlinhauer]

I just tried to do the same thing because we have thousands of tracks with only 1 track per album.
It is hard to figure out another way to get a filter to work for this because I want to keep the album name with the track - not change it to "various" or some other thing....

(lots of tracks from sampler cds that associate the tracks with the artists albums)

Any ideas on how to do this?

[MrSinatra]

you guys are both confusing me...

muel, i have only id3v2 tags, but some are 01 and some are 01/12 and some are just 1

they still sort right in ML, even if they are mixed in the SAME album.

Spen, i think you need to use the "album artist" tag. you need to add that column to your ML.

[muel2002]

MrSinatra

It's not about sorting the tracks ordinally according to their 'track #' number. It's about filtering out tracks that are the only ones that have a particular album name. So if you have one track from an album, you don't want to see that.

There is a 'tracks' column (not to be confused with the 'track #' column), this will display the total number of tracks that you have with a particular album name.

Spenlinhauer

There is a work around for it as I have just discovered, I don't know why I didn't figure this out or bother figuring this out last time . . .

- Get up an 'album' view with a total track ('tracks') column.

- Order the entries so all the albums with a single track are at the top.

- Select the first entry then scroll down and 'shift' click on the last single track entry.

- In the wider segment below the album view, it will show all the tracks you've selected in the album view. Select all of the tracks in the wider segment, right click, then select either. .

'edit metadata for selection' . . . or . . . 'view file info'

each one will give you a different set of things to edit, I'm not sure about the logic of having the two seperate options or why it gives you the 'update file tag(s) if supported' toggle in the 'edit metadata. .' option (why else would you select this option other than to update the data?!)

The idea now is to select a field which you think will not have any important/useful info it or one which you don't mind losing the info from. This is so you can enter you own info in the field.

I chose the 'category' field which I found when clicking on the 'edit metadata for selection' option. For all the tracks that had a unique entry in the album field, I simply entered '1', this can now be used for filtering purposes in Winamp. Obviously this can then be done for files which share an album title with one other file by giving them (yes you guessed it) the number '2' in the category field, and so forth.

Hope that helps.


An alternative way around it is to find a program that can automatically add all the total track info into the id3v2 tags, but that would be a right pain in the bum.

[MrSinatra]

Originally Posted by muel2002

MrSinatra

It's not about sorting the tracks ordinally according to their 'track #' number. It's about filtering out tracks that are the only ones that have a particular album name. So if you have one track from an album, you don't want to see that.

There is a 'tracks' column (not to be confused with the 'track #' column), this will display the total number of tracks that you have with a particular album name.

so you solved this by just adding id3v2 tags?

Originally Posted by muel2002

Spenlinhauer'edit metadata for selection' . . . or . . . 'view file info'

each one will give you a different set of things to edit, I'm not sure about the logic of having the two seperate options or why it gives you the 'update file tag(s) if supported' toggle in the 'edit metadata. .' option (why else would you select this option other than to update the data?!)

b/c you can just update the ML without updating the tags.

and two options b/c one is for mass edits, and the other for individuals.

Originally Posted by muel2002

An alternative way around it is to find a program that can automatically add all the total track info into the id3v2 tags, but that would be a right pain in the bum.

so to use the tracks criteria in smartview, it has to be id3v2, and the info must be entered as 07/13 ?

[muel2002]

Originally Posted by MrSinatra

so you solved this by just adding id3v2 tags?

No, I didn't solve the problem by adding id3v2 tags, but discovered you could alleviate the problem by adding extra info / the full info that the id3v2 'track #' fields allow. So you would have to add '01/10' in an id3v2 'track #' field as in 1st track of 10, if a id3 tag just had '01' as the track number or '1' if it was id3v1, Winamp won't allow you to filter files according to how many other files they share an album name with.

However, not all my tags have this track data and I can't be bothered to put it into all my tags.

Originally Posted by MrSinatra

so to use the tracks criteria in smartview, it has to be id3v2, and the info must be entered as 07/13 ?

To 'filter' by 'tracks' criteria in smartview, yes.

[Spenlinhauer]

Muel,

Thanks for that great idea... worked like a charm!

I used "single track" text so it makes sense to me in a couple of years when I see that tag....

[MrSinatra]

Originally Posted by muel2002

No, I didn't solve the problem by adding id3v2 tags, but discovered you could alleviate the problem by adding extra info / the full info that the id3v2 'track #' fields allow. So you would have to add '01/10' in an id3v2 'track #' field as in 1st track of 10, if a id3 tag just had '01' as the track number or '1' if it was id3v1, Winamp won't allow you to filter files according to how many other files they share an album name with.

However, not all my tags have this track data and I can't be bothered to put it into all my tags.

my guess is someone over at the mp3tag forums would know the formula for calculating total tracks and transforming existing numbered tracks into that, ie 7 becomes 07/13.

the trick is partial albums.

so if u had 3 tracks from a 20 track album, labelled as tracks 4, 9, and 12, you'd want the last highest number to be total tracks, (since the formula can't know its 20)

of course, some autotaggers will do it as ##/## so u could fix a lot of them that way, and mp3tag should be able to do that as well.