Filter by Decade

[user24 87]

1 hour ago, hthgihwaymonk said:

I'm adding tags to content now that include Decade 1990s and so on.
It's a few more clicks, but at least it gets what I want when I'm in the mood to look at content by decade

if "Decade" not in TagItems_value:
   ## ADD TAG

 

At the moment I'm just learning Emby and experimenting with how to best set it up to suit me. Another possibility could be to add 1990s, 2000s, 2010s, etc as Genres to my music album files using Mp3tag or similar.  I like where Genres show up near the top of the music Album Artist pages compared to the Tags section appearing down lower. It will be a big job for my whole library so I'll be experimenting a lot more before committing to any specific method. So far it seems like Emby is flexible enough to set up workable structures that are not built into the application already.

[Junglejim 351]

27 minutes ago, user24 said:

At the moment I'm just learning Emby and experimenting with how to best set it up to suit me. Another possibility could be to add 1990s, 2000s, 2010s, etc as Genres to my music album files using Mp3tag or similar.  I like where Genres show up near the top of the music Album Artist pages compared to the Tags section appearing down lower. It will be a big job for my whole library so I'll be experimenting a lot more before committing to any specific method. So far it seems like Emby is flexible enough to set up workable structures that are not built into the application already.

What? Years are not a genre's.. but that's up to you. I really think this should be a filter! Working with tags or genre's etc. to work around something so simple is dogshit!

[arrbee99 1560]

I guess people do tend to succumb to workarounds when they've been waiting 4 years for something...

[Junglejim 351]

8 hours ago, arrbee99 said:

I guess people do tend to succumb to workarounds when they've been waiting 4 years for something...

Yeah it's sad that the dev responds with "Hi, yes this is a great idea for the future. Thanks for the feedback.", then proceeds to do nothing!

Spending hours of time adding tags or creating crazy genres just to accomplish what a simple filter could do is painfull.

The data is already there, you can filter by year. How hard would it be to group by decade?

[CBers 6771]

11 hours ago, arrbee99 said:

I guess people do tend to succumb to workarounds when they've been waiting 4 years for something...

I raised it back in 2014, almost 10 years ago.
 

 

[Junglejim 351]

36 minutes ago, CBers said:

I raised it back in 2014, almost 10 years ago.
 

 

wow! nuff said..

Just +1 this but I don't think it will make a difference.

Edited October 2, 2023 by Junglejim

[user24 87]

5 hours ago, Junglejim said:

Spending hours of time adding tags or creating crazy genres just to accomplish what a simple filter could do is painfull.

Agree 100%. Tags/genres/collections workarounds are not elegant solutions and will take an enormous of time to implement for large libraries. I'm experimenting with Emby/Plex/Jellyfin. Liking the UI of Emby the best so far, but finding there are some limitations with available categories (e.g. Decades, Countries). Unfortunately I don't have the technical skillset to code plug-ins or understand if they would even be possible.

[GrimReaper 3294]

With no intention to undermine completely valid FR, but this approach works just as well (and is even more elegant IMHO, as it saves a few clicks and some scrolling):

It took 4-5 minutes to create 10 SmartPlaylist's Live Collections (1930's-2020's), they auto-populate, and all it takes to reach them is switch to in-library Collectons tab (or select Collections library from Home Screen) - since they're all named starting with 1 or 2 they're always placed on top in the first two rows, so basically 2 clicks and no scrolling away, either from Home Screen or within library, as opposed to click, click, scroll, read, aim, click to select desired Filter. 

Edited October 2, 2023 by GrimReaper

[user24 87]

3 hours ago, GrimReaper said:

With no intention to undermine completely valid FR, but this approach works just as well (and is even more elegant IMHO, as it saves a few clicks and some scrolling):

Thank you very much for your assistance with this. I have managed to install the Smart Playlist 2.4.0.1 plugin and create a sample Decade collection/playlist, by following your advice. I am using it for Music. I can get the auto-population working for the Decade, but haven't yet figured out how to show just whole Albums, rather than individual Songs. Any further assistance would be helpful if you know how to do this please (even just a screen shot or link to an older relevant forum post?).

With the brief time I have spent with this so far, it seems to be a very useful and customisable plugin. Very elegant and much faster to get a good end result!!!

[GrimReaper 3294]

I don't use Music at all, so I honestly wouldn't know. If it follows same/similar logic as TV shows, you might wanna experiment with Type:Collection and EpiMode:Series or Season and properties "Album contains" and "Year is in the range", see what kind of results you'll get. 

Edited October 2, 2023 by GrimReaper

[arrbee99 1560]

I'm just having a go at adding them to collections one by one - filter by 1930, 1931, 1932...1939. Select all the movies it shows, add to an appropriately named new collection. Rinse, repeat. Worth a try. Probably something that has been suggested before but I was too dumb to understand. Can't enable Group Items Into Collections though.

Might work for albums as well ?

[arrbee99 1560]

Well that seemed to work. Till I decide I don't like it anyway.

Now I just have to spend an hour or three faffing around finding artwork for them.

Hmmm, wonder if there's a better way...

[arrbee99 1560]

15 hours ago, Junglejim said:

How hard would it be ?

Exactasmundo.

[user24 87]

@GrimReaperThanks for the suggestions. I still haven't managed to get it work for Music Albums as yet, but will now be following the relevant Smart Playlists 2.0 forum topic to gain more knowledge and ask any further questions. Will keep experimenting...

@arrbee99Thanks for the idea. Yes, it does work for reasonably quickly setting up Decade Music Album Collections, but it appears to be only possible to Shuffle Play a selected Album, within a Collection, not an entire Decade Collection. Therefore unfortunately not a useful solution for browsing and randomly listening to a chosen decade of music. Will keep experimenting...

[arrbee99 1560]

Its a start -

 

 

[user24 87]

Further experimenting, learning and observations...

I created 8 Decade Playlists that are perfect for random play of all songs within a selected Decade. This was extremely easy, using the Smart Playlist plugin, by selecting the Year category and a decade range. They auto populate and are essentially 'set and forget'. Just 30 minutes to set up (5 mins for the playlists and 25 mins for the graphics). 

It is interesting to see that there are some playlist Sort By options available (picture below). I can see that they would be useful in certain scenarios, but the Shuffle button suits my use case fine. Also, my Decade playlists will never be listened to all the way through, just for a few hours at a time.

The only minor downside is that the Playlist is not that friendly for browsing, but that doesn't really matter greatly because a Music Playlist is designed for playing!

I next tried setting up a Decade Music Collection (only one Decade so far). The advantage over a song Playlist is it is better for browsing Albums. I also like being able to see how many albums I have from that decade. However, there are no Sort By options in the Collection menu, like there are in the Playlist. The only arranging that can be done is by editing the Playlist heading and selecting the Display order: Sort Title or Release Year.

There are two more disadvantages:

(1) The Play button only loads in the first Album and the Shuffle button gives an immediate Error Message (Playback Error No playable items were found. Are you trying to play an empty folder?). Possibly I am doing something wrong??? If not, playing a whole Decade collection randomly via this method is not feasible. The Playlist option must be used instead, either by going to the Playlist section or embedding (in this case) the #1970s Playlist into the #1970s Album Collection. The embedding option works quite well.

(2) The data shown below the Album images is limiting (see picture above). We have the Album Title and the Year, but the Album Artist is missing. I cannot seem to find a way to add it, like there easily is in the main Music section. I think this would be a major limiting factor of Collections for any music fan. Perhaps the Collections were set up with Videos in mind rather than Albums?

Conclusions (so far)...

While there are no Decade Group/Sort/Filter options available on the main Emby pages, the Smart Playlists are an excellent way to easily play a Decade of Music. The Collections options are not quite as useful because of the limited sorting and playback for Albums.

None of the above is intended to flag additional feature requests or bug reporting. It's just what I have been finding so far and may be of some interest to others...

[arrbee99 1560]

So we can have IMHO pointless filters like Overview and Extras, but we're still waiting after almost half a decade for a proper implementation of this feature ?

[marcmale 11]

This topic is the proof that Emby's developpers don't care their users...  Emby have so much potential but now I only use Plex only because they listen their users... Sad but true...

[arrbee99 1560]

Welll.....I wouldn't go quite that far, but I guess I am a bit biased.

But still, Emby has talented people, so it baffles me that something that I imagine is so simple for them can take such a ridiculous amount of time...

[user24 87]

Well, 6 months on from me implementing "Decade Smart Playlists" for music, which are working very well for listening to Songs by Decade, I've still been trying to figure out a nice way for easily browsing Albums by Decade. Sure, using a competitor system is an option, but waiting for another half a decade isn't...!

4 hours ago, arrbee99 said:

we're still waiting after almost half a decade for a proper implementation of this feature

4 hours ago, marcmale said:

Emby have so much potential but now I only use Plex

My current Emby method is to use Genres. Yes, I know that a Decade is not a 'technically correct' Genre, but it is an available field within Emby that can be relatively easily imported, from embedded music metadata, at a Song/Album/Artist level. (Tags cannot yet achieve this, as far as I know?). These are my current "Decade Genres":

To create these manually for a large library would be extremely painful, but it can be done semi-automatically by using MP3tag scripting functions: E.g.:

Format value “GENRE”: $if($and($geql(%year%,1950),$leql(%year%,1959)),%genre%; #1950s,%genre%)
Format value “GENRE”: $if($and($geql(%year%,1960),$leql(%year%,1969)),%genre%; #1960s,%genre%)
Format value “GENRE”: $if($and($geql(%year%,1970),$leql(%year%,1979)),%genre%; #1970s,%genre%)
Format value “GENRE”: $if($and($geql(%year%,1980),$leql(%year%,1989)),%genre%; #1980s,%genre%)
Format value “GENRE”: $if($and($geql(%year%,1990),$leql(%year%,1999)),%genre%; #1990s,%genre%)
Format value “GENRE”: $if($and($geql(%year%,2000),$leql(%year%,2009)),%genre%; #2000s,%genre%)
Format value “GENRE”: $if($and($geql(%year%,2010),$leql(%year%,2019)),%genre%; #2010s,%genre%)
Format value “GENRE”: $if($and($geql(%year%,2020),$leql(%year%,2029)),%genre%; #2020s,%genre%)

For the non-coders (like me), these Genres were created by combining the following 4 boolean functions

• $if(x,y,z)      if x is true, y is returned, otherwise z.
• $and(x,y)    returns true if x and y are true.
• $geql(x,y)   returns true if x is greater than or equal to y.
• $leql(x,y)    returns true if x is less than or equal to y.

I expect that any coders reading this could do this more elegantly?

The Genre field(s) also appears in convenient locations near the top of the music pages, without needing any CSS manipulation:

Lastly, by using color-coded emoji icons, it's possible to group the Genres so they appear in the grouping and order that you want (I'm still experimenting with this).

If (when?) Emby implement RoonAlbumTag importing, I'll probably try out Decades as Tags, although they'll then be near the bottom of the pages. 

It would be great if the talented Emby developers could nicely integrate some useful built-in Decade options for Music/Movies/etc. - perhaps one day?!?!

[Junglejim 351]

2 hours ago, user24 said:

Well, 6 months on from me implementing "Decade Smart Playlists" for music, which are working very well for listening to Songs by Decade, I've still been trying to figure out a nice way for easily browsing Albums by Decade. Sure, using a competitor system is an option, but waiting for another half a decade isn't...!

My current Emby method is to use Genres. Yes, I know that a Decade is not a 'technically correct' Genre, but it is an available field within Emby that can be relatively easily imported, from embedded music metadata, at a Song/Album/Artist level. (Tags cannot yet achieve this, as far as I know?). These are my current "Decade Genres":

To create these manually for a large library would be extremely painful, but it can be done semi-automatically by using MP3tag scripting functions: E.g.:

Format value “GENRE”: $if($and($geql(%year%,1950),$leql(%year%,1959)),%genre%; #1950s,%genre%)
Format value “GENRE”: $if($and($geql(%year%,1960),$leql(%year%,1969)),%genre%; #1960s,%genre%)
Format value “GENRE”: $if($and($geql(%year%,1970),$leql(%year%,1979)),%genre%; #1970s,%genre%)
Format value “GENRE”: $if($and($geql(%year%,1980),$leql(%year%,1989)),%genre%; #1980s,%genre%)
Format value “GENRE”: $if($and($geql(%year%,1990),$leql(%year%,1999)),%genre%; #1990s,%genre%)
Format value “GENRE”: $if($and($geql(%year%,2000),$leql(%year%,2009)),%genre%; #2000s,%genre%)
Format value “GENRE”: $if($and($geql(%year%,2010),$leql(%year%,2019)),%genre%; #2010s,%genre%)
Format value “GENRE”: $if($and($geql(%year%,2020),$leql(%year%,2029)),%genre%; #2020s,%genre%)

For the non-coders (like me), these Genres were created by combining the following 4 boolean functions

• $if(x,y,z)      if x is true, y is returned, otherwise z.
• $and(x,y)    returns true if x and y are true.
• $geql(x,y)   returns true if x is greater than or equal to y.
• $leql(x,y)    returns true if x is less than or equal to y.

I expect that any coders reading this could do this more elegantly?

The Genre field(s) also appears in convenient locations near the top of the music pages, without needing any CSS manipulation:

Lastly, by using color-coded emoji icons, it's possible to group the Genres so they appear in the grouping and order that you want (I'm still experimenting with this).

If (when?) Emby implement RoonAlbumTag importing, I'll probably try out Decades as Tags, although they'll then be near the bottom of the pages. 

It would be great if the talented Emby developers could nicely integrate some useful built-in Decade options for Music/Movies/etc. - perhaps one day?!?!

Nice work mate! It would be great if the Emby dev's could achieve this in core. I'm not too worried about the meta/genres display but more on the filtering aspect.

Both would be cool though.

[arrbee99 1560]

Yep, there's some nice workarounds and some nice lateral thinking, it would just be really nice if it wasn't necessary...

[Junglejim 351]

10 minutes ago, arrbee99 said:

Yep, there's some nice workarounds and some nice lateral thinking, it would just be really nice if it wasn't necessary...

Yeah I agree. I could be getting cynical in my old age but this feature prob wont bring in new subs/users. Sure they fast track intro skip (most of the work done by third party devs ) because that will bring in peeps/$$...

Hopefully I'm wrong.

[rbjtech 4269]

I may do a little experimentation today and add this into the MediaInfo plugin to simply add the date as a decade tag.   At least you can then filter by decade if you wish (or combine with other tags/genres.)

But agree 100% with the sentiment above - how hard could this be to to add into the date filter - that is afterall where you would naturally goto to use such a filter ..

[arrbee99 1560]

Well it might possibly bring in a few dollars from those people who say I think I'll try Emby and if it's good I'll get Premiere, followed by what, can't filter by decade (plus a few other things it can't do...) leading to oh well, maybe not.

MedInfo thing sounds handy, maybe then I can go back to grouping items into Collections, which I can't do with my existing workaround Decades Collections.