show container/bitrate in album view

[Jägs 72]

Maybe I missed it somewhere, but is it possible to show the container/bitrate when viewing an album?  This is related to my original request:

And was partially addressed in 4.7 with the new table view:

And while I can change the libraries to use table view,  I cannot seem to find an option to do so when viewing an album.  If it is available, kindly point me to a resource on how to enable it.  While I'm at it, this would be great for the search, too.

NOTE:  I know that I can click on the three dots next to a song on the album and then click on the info icon to see this, but that is a few extra clicks, and I may not have an entire album in the same container/bitrate.

RATIONALE:  I buy a ton of used CDs and digital music and am slowly replacing MP3s with lossless.  When I'm in the store, not only do I want to check if I have an album, but whether I have the whole album and whether I have it in lossless format.

NOTE:  I'm running Version 4.8.0.45 beta and will soon upgrade to the latest beta.

[Luke 37071]

HI, the information is tied to the tracks, not the album. But maybe we could grab the container from the first track.

[Jägs 72]

Thanks for the response!  That makes sense.

My only concern about the approach you proposed is that I do have a number of albums I originally purchased as an MP3 album (e.g., from Amazon, which doesn't do lossless) and have purchased favored tracks as FLAC, so reading this from the first track would be inaccurate for the album as a whole.

[rbjtech 4270]

9 hours ago, Luke said:

HI, the information is tied to the tracks, not the album. But maybe we could grab the container from the first track.

Not sure why the first track would be an indicator that all the other tracks are the same container ?

Maybe check them all, then make a decision - but this could equally apply for the quality.   I would love to see the Album quality appear as a displayed field on the clients, currently I'm having to do the logic myself and then append it to the Album 'Description' which looks a little out of place vs a nicely placed 'FLAC' or even 'FLAC 24Bit 96Khz' if you are an audiophile .. 

 

[ebr 14913]

10 hours ago, Jägs said:

Thanks for the response!  That makes sense.

My only concern about the approach you proposed is that I do have a number of albums I originally purchased as an MP3 album (e.g., from Amazon, which doesn't do lossless) and have purchased favored tracks as FLAC, so reading this from the first track would be inaccurate for the album as a whole.

Right, so how are we to show a container and bitrate for an Album?  As you point out, the album itself doesn't have those properties.

[Jägs 72]

I'd like the bitrate/container for the individual tracks contained within the album.  Coming from Subsonic, this is something I miss.  Here's the album view from Airsonic (one of the Subsonic clones0, which is customizable—like the Emby table view, you can toggle things like bitrate/container/etc.—and is similar for all of its clones:

Edited October 2, 2023 by Jägs
replaced Subsonic with Airsonic

[rbjtech 4270]

19 hours ago, ebr said:

Right, so how are we to show a container and bitrate for an Album?  As you point out, the album itself doesn't have those properties.

Add the fields ? 

Same for TV Series/Show - I'm still unsure why those 'quality' fields are missing - it seems an obvious omission.   You have them for Movies ..

I'm sure a lot of people would love to see the option of putting a 'quality' next to the Album or TV Show.

Answer me this - how can you add a basic filter to show all your old MP3 albums or list all your 4K quality TV Shows ?   Answer is you cannot do this - you can only do it by Songs or Episodes which imho is very poor.

Music 'Album' Options -

For TV Shows -

But for Movies - we can show the Resolution/Quality and even container if we wish. 

Why not make them all consistant and allow 'quality' and 'container' for each type ?

 

Edited October 2, 2023 by rbjtech

[GrimReaper 3294]

30 minutes ago, rbjtech said:

Same for TV Series/Show - I'm still unsure why those 'quality' fields are missing - it seems an obvious omission.   You have them for Movies ..

Because Movies are single items (with their respective container/bitrate), TV shows are collections of items (where each one can have - and likely does have - it's own container/resolution/bitrate). You cannot leverage MediaInfo on TV show level - you can do it only on movie/episode level. Sane goes for Albums, as they're collections of tracks - maybe they're all the same bitrate, and just as likely maybe they're not. 

 

[rbjtech 4270]

33 minutes ago, GrimReaper said:

Because Movies are single items (with their respective container/bitrate), TV shows are collections of items (where each one can have - and likely does have - it's own container/resolution/bitrate). You cannot leverage MediaInfo on TV show level - you can do it only on movie/episode level. Sane goes for Albums, as they're collections of tracks - maybe they're all the same bitrate, and just as likely maybe they're not. 

 

I fully get that - the episodes/songs have a Parent - but that is still no reason to not have the option of providing the optional Parent level quality/container information.

When you buy a CD - you expect it to be CD Quality (all of it - lol) - thus if you rip it to FLAC, then it's also reasonable to expect that you rip the entire album to FLAC.    Thus needing this information.    If your album or collection is a selection of various quality files - then fine - simply don't make that album or collection one 'quality' because it's not.

Also applies to a TV Show - If I'm watching a show, it's nice to know if the show is going to be 4K or some low quality SD.   If I buy a Blu-Ray boxset - then I can reasonable expect all my rips of that box set/show to be of the fixed quality I ripped it at.   Why would I rip one episode at a different 'quality' ?     Again -  I should not have to go into the show and look at the episode layer to find this out - likely from looking at the media info from the first epsiode.

Edited October 2, 2023 by rbjtech

[ebr 14913]

3 hours ago, rbjtech said:

but that is still no reason to not have the option of providing the optional Parent level quality/container information

But it is because any such property we assigned to the parent would be ambiguous at best and just wrong at worst. 

[rbjtech 4270]

8 minutes ago, ebr said:

But it is because any such property we assigned to the parent would be ambiguous at best and just wrong at worst. 

All people are asking for is the availability of a field to put the optional information.

If it's a no - then fine, I'll continue to use a 'hack' to get around embys deficiency, but trying to say it is not a valid requirement because the manual information may be 'wrong' is avoiding the issue being raised...

[ebr 14913]

11 minutes ago, rbjtech said:

but trying to say it is not a valid requirement because the manual information may be 'wrong' is avoiding the issue being raised...

If you look everywhere this type of information is,  you'll notice it is neither editable nor optional.  That is because we make critical playback decisions with it and we cannot afford to allow someone to edit it to something they think is more appropriate and then have those be bad decisions.

Now, I realize this information would not be used in that way but it creates a hole in the dam of this type of information and many users would not understand the distinction between this "not really true" information that looks just like the other information.  The bottom line is an album does not have any container or bitrate because it is just a container itself.

We provide tagging for this type of user-defined categorization if you wish.

That is from a display perspective.  Now, as for searching or filtering, we can potentially provide those because we could show an album if, say any item within it matched the filter selections.  We do that in other instances.

Finally, what I now understand the OP is actually asking for is not an album-level property but, instead, just to show the track-level properties in the view.  That is certainly possible.

[rbjtech 4270]

20 minutes ago, ebr said:

If you look everywhere this type of information is,  you'll notice it is neither editable nor optional.  That is because we make critical playback decisions with it and we cannot afford to allow someone to edit it to something they think is more appropriate and then have those be bad decisions.

Now, I realize this information would not be used in that way but it creates a hole in the dam of this type of information and many users would not understand the distinction between this "not really true" information that looks just like the other information.  The bottom line is an album does not have any container or bitrate because it is just a container itself.

We provide tagging for this type of user-defined categorization if you wish.

That is from a display perspective.  Now, as for searching or filtering, we can potentially provide those because we could show an album if, say any item within it matched the filter selections.  We do that in other instances.

Finally, what I now understand the OP is actually asking for is not an album-level property but, instead, just to show the track-level properties in the view.  That is certainly possible.

Thanks for taking the time to answer Eric.

[Carlo 4330]

@ebrThe view shown above from Airsonic is a really useful view that I think would be a welcome addition to all library types. Being able to select the columns to display (changes from default) for each library type would be ideal. Having the ability to assign this view to specific screens would be even more helpful, such as default when looking at seasons, movies by actor, collections, playlists, etc...

[sydlexius 241]

7 hours ago, rbjtech said:

I fully get that - the episodes/songs have a Parent - but that is still no reason to not have the option of providing the optional Parent level quality/container information.

When you buy a CD - you expect it to be CD Quality (all of it - lol) - thus if you rip it to FLAC, then it's also reasonable to expect that you rip the entire album to FLAC.    Thus needing this information.    If your album or collection is a selection of various quality files - then fine - simply don't make that album or collection one 'quality' because it's not.

Also applies to a TV Show - If I'm watching a show, it's nice to know if the show is going to be 4K or some low quality SD.   If I buy a Blu-Ray boxset - then I can reasonable expect all my rips of that box set/show to be of the fixed quality I ripped it at.   Why would I rip one episode at a different 'quality' ?     Again -  I should not have to go into the show and look at the episode layer to find this out - likely from looking at the media info from the first epsiode.

The request also makes mention of bitrate.  What's a reasonable way to show the bitrate for an album when the tracks leverage VBR?

[Luke 37071]

1 minute ago, sydlexius said:

The request also makes mention of bitrate.  What's a reasonable way to show the bitrate for an album when the tracks leverage VBR?

Similar to container we’d probably just grab the value from the first track. 

[ebr 14913]

10 minutes ago, Luke said:

Similar to container we’d probably just grab the value from the first track. 

The request is not to show this as a property of the album.  It is to show it for each track on the album...

Which actually makes it the same request as this:

 

[Jägs 72]

38 minutes ago, ebr said:

Which actually makes it the same request as this:

 

Yeah, that would satisfy my request.  Sorry for not seeing that—in my defense, I was looking for bitrate/container!

As long as we can make this "stick."  I've had problems with setting table view with the desired options and each time I search/browse, it seems to reset to defaults, where bitrate/container are not selected.

Thanks for all of the discourse on this!