Artist Order in album-type display

[wwwombat]

I read through a few threads and am a little confused about the clusterings when using a non-titlestrip (i.e. album collections). Prior to this point I had been retagging all songs so that one and only one artist name appeared in the Track Artist, Album and Album Artist field (being overzealous and not knowing what Wincab used). This helps my aim of assembling the best of an artist's songs from multiple albums but have them appear as one logical album (i.e. I'm making my own "Greatest Hits Album" for each artist whether it contains 1, 2... or 20 songs)

With the recent discussions I decided to try something different to my normal tag protocol. Let's take Timbaland's recent "Shock Value" CD as an example. Almost all songs are credited to Timbaland featuring Someone.

In this case I have tagged each mp3 so that the Album and Album Artist fields are set to Timbaland (I was hoping Wincab used one of these for clustering) but the Track Artist is set to the full (i.e.) "Timbaland featuring Nelly Furtado & Justin Timberlake".

In this case, with jukebox.ini settings of SongSort = Artist, UseID3 = True and the default StrictAlbum1 = Greatest Hits, StrictAlbum2 = Original Motion Picture Soundtrack in use, I notice that following behaviour occurs (under the cd6-1-ws skin if it matters)

1) All songs are correctly assembled together under a first line of Timbaland (as was the case if the Artist was forced to be just Timbaland)

2) The Display of the Album Name(?) (it's the second line of this skin) is set to "Various Artists" (well... I guess with nowhere near 50% of the artists being the same since he has someone different helping him on each track, that's true).

3) In the individual song lists below this all of the full artist line for the track is depicted inside brackets (to the limitation of the skin) to the right of the track title. This is expected.

Now the kicker....

4) The album itself (on the pageflip displays) appears in the middle of the V listings (for Various Artists one presumes) rather than it appearing in its "correct" place in the T artists.

So, am I doing something wrong (either in tagging or some setting in jukebox.ini) or is some other magic at work?

Similarly, the "Grease" and "Rocky Horror Picture Show" albums, with each track having its own artists are correctly clustered but appear in the V/Various Artist section rather than the (respectively) G-based "Grease" and R-based "Rocky Horror Picture Show" to which I have set the "album" field in the MP3 tag.

[Chris]

The albums are ordered by artist, not by album title.  I thought I had implemented an album sort but I don't see it in the code.

[wwwombat]

No... on a whim and a prayer I tried typing that in and it told me in no uncertain terms what to do with it 

I have the same problem with Grandmaster Flash. "The Message" is by "Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five" whereas "White Lines" is by "Grandmaster Flash featuring Melle Mel" and with the artists tagged as such (and the 50% threshold not being reached) the "album" ends up in the Various Artists section.

Given I want to retain the full artist line then I guess my only possible saviour is to tag the Album with the grouping of "Grandmaster Flash" and then hope that a future wincab iteration allows an album sort (...pretty, pretty please?  )

[Chris]

No... on a whim and a prayer I tried typing that in and it told me in no uncertain terms what to do with it 

I have the same problem with Grandmaster Flash. "The Message" is by "Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five" whereas "White Lines" is by "Grandmaster Flash featuring Melle Mel" and with the artists tagged as such (and the 50% threshold not being reached) the "album" ends up in the Various Artists section.

Given I want to retain the full artist line then I guess my only possible saviour is to tag the Album with the grouping of "Grandmaster Flash" and then hope that a future wincab iteration allows an album sort (...pretty, pretty please?  )

You know, I really thought I had implemented it... maybe the symbol just isn't there.  Try setting SongSort=3.

[wwwombat]

Ah... magic numbers.. gotta love 'em 

I only have a small test set of files here at work (so I'll retry when I get home tonight) but initial trials seems to accept a value of SongSort=3 and the albums are duly sorted in that order.

So, in that respect my albums (which I've forced to be the singular Artist) now display in the correct order. I might just alter the skin so that the artist name field (which can still therefore be set to Various Artists if the 50% threshold isn't reached is dropped, since it's superfluous for my purposes)

So, that'll do for now Chris (Ta!)... although I still look forward to 3.15 to test it and other goodies again.

[Chris]

Ah... magic numbers.. gotta love 'em 

Not really a magic number in this case.. more like a bug that I'm taking advantage of.

Back when the CD version was first released, Album was the default sort, as sorting into albums was naturally part of the process.  An option to randomize the albums after they were sorted was added.  Well, no one liked the default sort so I added a step to resort by artist.  I added an IF statement to cover the new sort.  My error was changing the symbol from Album to Artist rather than adding a new symbol

So here I have two IF statements and two symbols.  If you pass something that is not a valid symbol, neither re-sort is performed and everything is left in the original album sort.

Now at some point I went back and added checks to the configuration reader to prevent invalid options from being passed, but somehow I missed adding the check to SongSort.  So 3 isn't a magic number so much as an invalid one.  Thus, for 3.1.5, I simply added "ALBUM" back to the symbol table and fixed the check on SongSort.

All of the symbols translate to "magic numbers" internally, and ALBUM does happen to translate to 3.  More than one symbol can translate to a particular value which is handy; you don't have to guess if I use the spelling "gray" or "grey", or "color" or "colour", since both spellings are in the symbol table pointing to the same values.  Likewise, "Yes", "True", and "Enabled" all mean 1, and "No", "False", "None", and "Disabled" all mean 0.  I use a similar system for colors, allowing you to use "White" instead of #FFFFFF, etc.

So, that'll do for now Chris (Ta!)... although I still look forward to 3.15 to test it and other goodies again.

Not a lot of "goodies" in 3.1.5, mostly just bug fixes.  Here's the change list:

• Added a new default cover art image.
• Added a basic internal constructed cover art image if default image is missing.
• Added a symbol for Album sort.
• Added an AUTO setting for DefaultArtCacheMB to allow different defaults in DOS and Windows.
• Added ability to map mouse buttons to controls.
• Changed default art cache to 32MB in Windows.  Default for DOS is still 4MB.
• Changed random song select to only use the Random Popularity Preference setting if top quarter of songs have more than one play each.
• Changed product name to DWJukebox.
• Fixed crash of jukebox on invalid CD art images, including JPG files missing a JFIF header.

So, that'll do for now Chris (Ta!)... although I still look forward to 3.15 to test it and other goodies again.

Fair enough... I threw the latest build at http://dwjukebox.com/releases/dwj30105b.zip if you want to try it.  It's just the executables and docs, so it needs to be unZipped over a 3.1.4 installation.

--Chris

[Chris]

Fair enough... I threw the latest build at http://dwjukebox.com/releases/dwj30105b.zip if you want to try it.  It's just the executables and docs, so it needs to be unZipped over a 3.1.4 installation.

I just replaced the beta... got one last minute fix in and added the new "generic album art" image I created.

[wwwombat]

Just want to report in whilst I'm posting another thread that the 3.1.5 update does indeed do what I want... just need to tag the Album field with the artist name though for my particular case.

Now all I need to do, since my Album Artist and Artist name are one and the same is figure out how, where, if it's possible to suppress the display of one of these two fields on the display for cleanliness and possibly buy an extra line.

On a totally unrelated matter I can see where I can alter the colour of the display elements (track listings, popular display etc (there's 4 of 'em) but I can't find out where to change the colour of the message that appears when wincab fires up and checks to see if its database needs updating. It seems this is locked to, in my case, the deafult greenish colour for the skin. Not a big concern but I'd like it to be a bluish colour as well to make the rest of my scheme.

[Chris]

On a totally unrelated matter I can see where I can alter the colour of the display elements (track listings, popular display etc (there's 4 of 'em) but I can't find out where to change the colour of the message that appears when wincab fires up and checks to see if its database needs updating. It seems this is locked to, in my case, the deafult greenish colour for the skin. Not a big concern but I'd like it to be a bluish colour as well to make the rest of my scheme.

That color is hardcoded... I didn't bother making it configurable.  I may cheat and just have it inherit one of the display colors.