Filter/Sort Music Album Artist by Country

[Michael K. 24]

I have an eclectic collection of music from around the world and I wish there was a way to filter music Album Artists by country.

Edited October 1, 2016 by Michael K.

[Deathsquirrel 745]

Possibly not ideal but you could add country of origin as one of your genre tags.

[user24 313]

A very old topic but still a good one (at least for me anyway)! This is something that I’ve REALLY wanted for quite a while now...

• Country Tags works ok, BUT they are difficult to easily see without scrolling, being near the bottom of the Album Artist detail pages (or finding via the Tag menu tab). Plus text clutter can easily result.
• Country Genres brings the Country info to near the top of the relevant pages, BUT I then end up with way too many ‘non-Genre’ Genre categories as workarounds. Plus text clutter can easily result.

Both the above methods give effective filtering, however neither easily show Country, at-a-glance, with minimal clutter. Randomly revisiting this today, I happened to make an interesting Emby discovery that I was previously unaware of:

While Windows doesn’t directly support Country flag emojis, Emby does!!!

Therefore, while these flag emojis cannot be written into Emby directly from a Windows keyboard entry, they can be copied and pasted from a relevant emoji website such as: https://emojipedia.org/flags or https://flagpedia.net/emoji. (There may be other technical methods to do this using the relevant codes???) Also, if the Country flags are pasted into Mp3tag Artist fields they will revert to a two-letter code, but the corresponding flag image will still be imported correctly into Emby upon using Rescan Library. 

So far, I’ve tried adding the flags as an Album Artist Title suffix. This gives Country at-a-glance on both the Album Artist summary page (when there is sufficient room) and the Album Artist detail pages:

Now, the Album Artist Country is in a very prominent position, BUT standard Emby Tags, flag emojis and/or Country letter codes or text still need to be used for filtering, and possibly more detailed location info, if needed:

A more elegant integrated solution could perhaps be a dedicated Country field to the RHS of the Album Artist Title (or near the top somewhere) that shows the info AND is a multi-field selectable Tag filter, like Genres, which goes directly to the relevant Tag page.

The same type of implementation could also apply for Movie, TV and other pages where Country data has been requested by others?

If Emby, at some stage, implement something similar, and automatic, then that would be great! If not, then I’m hoping that the forthcoming ‘smart functions’ plus using flag emojis may still give the easy visibility and access that I’ve been wanting.

Anyway, perhaps this post will be useful to others that were not aware that emoji Country flags could be added to Emby fields and for those who are wanting to manually curate their libraries accordingly? Cheers!

Edited December 2, 2024 by user24
formatting

[user24 313]

I'm possibly just talking to myself, but following on from yesterday...

A Chrome Browser Extension may also be required to see the flag emojis rather than the country codes. I tried Country Flag Fixer and it is working at the moment - so far so good! Flagmoji is another option.

I also tried flag prefixes, as an alternative to suffixes. I think I prefer it, but for the Album Artist order to remain alphabetical, then Sort Title can't include the flag.

That's a bit more progress for today and hopefully getting a bit closer to a good workable solution!

Edited December 3, 2024 by user24