Music multi sort

[Tikuf 663]

I only mention music because it would make more sense to me for music but it could be applied to other media as well.

 

The structure of the music is required for picking up items but what I would really like to see is the ability through the api to sort on multiple fields

 

For example

 

I would love to be able to show my music without jumping through the artist folder eg

 

Albums/then sorted by artist/then sorted by year. So all my Deep Purple albums(yer Im old) were together and then they appeared in year order. I think it could be done with sql queries alone?

and a few changes to the urls.

 

I think flexibility like this would be a great addition to mb3.

[Abobader 2958]

I hope this not the only option, since I do not do "Albums" in my music folders setup, it only "artist", all the songs is tags.

[Luke 37261]

i will expand the item queries to allow multiple sort orders

[Luke 37261]

This is done.

 

SortBy is now a comma delimited list.

 

I also added Artist, AlbumArtist and Album to it.

 

Then I added IncludeItemTypes to ItemQuery - the opposite of ExcludeItemTypes. This will make the sort of thing tikuf was talking about possible.

[Tikuf 663]

Excellent thanks

[Luke 37261]

You can use this sort of thing to present an additional top level collection that is essentially a music view of the library, where instead of presenting based on file system structure, you could do it based on queries.

 

Actually you could do it for any type although music seems like the obvious choice. This is something I'd like to do in the dashboard browser too.

 

So get creative.

[Redshirt 1487]

Once you've requested your root folders. It's still an api call to get the collection contents before you can say "Wait this is music" and then do an optimized 2nd call. Correct?

[Luke 37261]

No. Since we don't have the capability to identify a collection as a specific type, if you wanted to do a virtual music view, you would just show it alongside the VF's and run the query recursively against the root folder.

 

One could argue that's a better route anyway - it takes the file system completely out of the picture, brings back all audio, which the user can then refine using other filtering options.

 

This is the kind of thing i'm envisioning for the dashboard browser, except on steroids

 

http://elan.plexapp.com/files/2012/08/P ... ient-1.jpg

[Luke 37261]

If you don't want to do that, then yes, you could always request a few children of each vf to try and sniff the collection type.

[Redshirt 1487]

lol, how's that for a new MB slogan. "Plex on steriods"

[ebr 14959]

You can use this sort of thing to present an additional top level collection that is essentially a music view of the library, where instead of presenting based on file system structure, you could do it based on queries.

 

Actually you could do it for any type although music seems like the obvious choice. This is something I'd like to do in the dashboard browser too.

 

So get creative.

 

Yeah, I like this approach and it is how I designed the whole Music plug-in for MB2. I was surprised by how many people resisted it (and continue to) but I think it is the best way to deal with complex structures like music.