[kiboy6]

Sorry if this is already possible, but as of XBMC 28276 I can't find any way to view singles by genre.



I would love to be able to either :
select singles, and then sort by/show individual genres

And/or :

Have singles show up as a separate "Artist" when I browse by genre.

Currently browsing by genre only allows (AFAIK) sort by artist name, so all the singles are only viewable under their respective artist. I would love to be able to select "Soul" and then singles to see all Soul Singles in my library.

Of course this would be doable with a smart playlist, but any thoughts on integrating such a feature into XBMC's library view directly?

Thanks

[jmarshall]

The problem is it doesn't really fit the hierarchy we have - genres/artists/albums/songs. You want to skip artists.

We really need a more general way to:

1. Filter (in your case by album empty)
2. Group (in your case by genre)

Smart playlists handle 1, but don't handle 2.

Cheers,
Jonathan

[kiboy6]

Thanks for the response jmarshall. I see the difficulties inherent in such a thing.

However, given that anyone with a significant music collection has a large collection of singles, i would argue for a special case being made for "singles". I don't know how it would be achieved, but could there not be way to always have a shortcut to "singles" at the top of any list of artists?

Of course this is very tricky with the current "album" field blank being the only way to designate singles.

One idea, and i may be way off the mark in thinking this is possible, would be for

album field = blank ----> invisible extra "album artist" called singles in XBMC's database.

So singles would show up as an "artist" in any genre refined list of artists

Could that work?

Failing that, what about a "sort by genre" option for the Singles display? I guess that would become problematic with items with multiple genres...

:confused2:

[kraqh3d]

The "Singles" collection should be at the albums level in the hierarchy.

If you enter at Genres, you can pick one, ie Punk. You now get an Artists listing for all artists which match genre Punk. From here, if you choose "All Artists" you would get a list of all albums which match Punk, regardless of Artist.

Thus, there should be also be a Singles collection presented in addition to the albums which if chosen would present a list of all songs with genre Punk and where the album is blank. Does this not work?

(corrected typo)

[jmarshall]

I'm pretty sure we don't have a "Singles" item when you list albums - eg at the main "Albums" node we don't list a separate singles item (IMO this is how it should be).

I can kind of see how having a separate "Singles" item under a genre filtered album list might be useful, however.

Really though, our current heirarchy approach is too limiting in some respects - it would be nicer to be able to specify filter and grouping criteria independently and having the heirarchy built using these constructs (top level is group by genre, next level is filter by genre group by artist, next level is filter by genre, artist group by album etc.)

Cheers,
Jonathan

[kraqh3d]

True. Then would it be fair to say that a "Singles" psuedo-album just should not be displayed as part of an albums listing if *both* the genre and artist filters are blank? That would fit right into the navigation schema.

[jmarshall]

Seems reasonable to me.

[kraqh3d]

This should be a very simple change to CMusicDatabase::GetAlbumsNav(). There's an else block that excludes items with an empty album title if the artist is unfiltered. You can find it by this comment: // no artist given, so exclude any single albums (aka empty tagged albums)

Replacing the else with what's below should do the trick to make the Singles pseudo-album appear when navigating from genres and the genre is filtered but the artist is not.

Code:

// exclude Singles only if both genre and artist are unfiltered
if (idGenre == -1 && idArtist == -1)
{
// existing code block
}

But I can't test this until probably Wednesday. In the meantime, feel free to try this change, and post the results.

** edit **
Has anyone had to the opportunity to test out this little hack? I meant to, but I've been drunk even night this week I can give it a whirl on Sunday afternoon (NY time).