Question on "entryage"

[quad]

Hey there.

I tried to use customized a "last 15 entries" for my main menu, and tried following:

Code: [Select]

"Incoming (Last 15)" -> artist ? entryage < "15" & commitid > "0" -> album -> title = "fmt_title"

... but sadly, it's not working as it should. actually it shows lot more than the last 15 albums. yes, i mean albums! so my goal is, to have the navigation like "Artist > Album > Tracks", but this menu entry should only show the last 15 entries.

how do i realize this?

thanks in advance.

[GodEater]

What do you mean by "last 15 entries" ?

The last 15 tracks you played? Or the last 15 you copied to the device ?

[quad]

whoop.

yes i mean the last 15 albums i copied to the device.

BUT i want to have the normal "Artist > Album > Track" navigation and not the "Album > Track" as default.

edit: ... anyone? 

[quad]

looks like it's not fixed in the 3.0 (or newer daily) ... so can anyone help with a workaround, please?

[Llorean]

Rockbox doesn't know the order you copied albums to the disk. All it  can really do is say "Hey, all these songs weren't here before, they're all in the database now."

My guess is that your list is showing every song from the last 15 times you added music to your player, independent of how much music you added.

The reason this isn't "fixed" is that so far you haven't described a bug, just a misunderstanding of how the database works.

[quad]

ah hm. so you mean, rockbox also don't show the last 15 albums, when i try this:

album ? entryage < "15" & commitid > "0" -> title = "fmt_title"

whatever.

what i don't get to work is following ... i would appreciate a feature, what shows me the last 15 (or "x") copied albums to the device.

for example these are the last 15 albums i copied to the device:

artist1 - albumA
artist1 - albumB
artist1 - albumC
artist2 - albumA
artist2 - albumB
artist3 - albumA
artist4 - albumA
artist4 - albumB
artist4 - albumC
artist4 - albumD
artist5 - albumA
artist6 - albumA
artist6 - albumB
artist7 - albumA
artist8 - albumA

as you can see, sometimes 2 or 3, maybe 4 albums of one artist.

when i now copy 2 new albums to the device, the view should kick out albumA and albumB of artist1.

as i posted before, i tried this:

artist ? entryage < "15" & commitid > "0" -> album -> title = "fmt_title"

... but looks like, that doesn't work corectly. in versions weeks ago, it works not corectly (sometimes it showed the last 12, sometimes the last 30). in the lastest build it doesn't show any change in this view, when i copy new albums to the device.

do you know now what i mean?

[GodEater]

How would Rockbox *know* which were the last 15 items you've copied over the device are? I think this is the bit you're missing.

[quad]

hm. then can you explain me the "entryage"-thing? really i don't get it. i programm dbs every day at work. it's a normal query to ask for "last 15 entries". thought "entryage < 15" is like this.

[GodEater]

Let me try to explain via an example.

You have a cupboard where you keep stuff, you know what's in it.

You go out for the day, and while you're gone, I put 30 new items into your cupboard.

You come home, open your cupboard, and look inside. Which were the last 15 items I placed in there ?

You have no way of knowing, because you weren't there when I did it. All you know is that there are now 30 new items in there - you have no idea in what order they were placed there.

That's what's going on with the database - you plug in USB, Rockbox goes to sleep, when it wakes up again and you update the database, there will be new stuff in it, but there's no way for Rockbox to know in what order you placed those items on the storage device. "entryage" can only start going up once the item is already *in* the database.

[quad]

great, that was a rockbox-db-for-dummies answer -- and i get it! thanks, man. sad, that there is no real "db query function" for the music-db. maybe in next versions...

[GodEater]

The only way to implement what you want is to get the database entries for items updates *as* they are copied to the device. Since Rockbox doesn't have a companion PC program to do this currently - it's just not possible. The database only gets to look at what to add when the file copying over USB has finished entirely.

I guess you could do a poor-man's effort with this by only copying one item each time you plug in USB, but that would be SOOO laborius.

So you could perhaps step up and implement a nice program which syncs that database as files are copied over. I'm sure people would thank you. (Not me though, I don't use the database!)

Edit
----
I've just realised as well that you were asking for last 15 *Albums* too. I think the Rockbox database only measures the age of *tracks*, not albums. But I could be wrong.

Edit 2
----
Do you perchance own some flavour of ipod ? Or some other player ?

[quad]

no, i use a sansa e280.

i would apreciate this feature, because i use the sansa mainly for checking new music. i get a lot of promo-stuff which i have to check. i copy these albums to the player so i can check in the "last 15" whats new on the player. i often don't know what i copy to the device. otherwise i would "see" whats new, because normally you know what you have on your player. but it rotates so much on my device, that i don't know it.

[GodEater]

Well get coding then

[pizza4me]

Is it possible just to drag/drop the new songs into a separate directory?  Then you can just go into your "Files" (instead of the database) and open the directory you copied them to.  If you make separate files for each album, then you won't have to worry about how it sorts them either.  You could do by album/track, or artist/album/track, or both if you copy them in twice, I guess...

Actually, since you're using a Sansa, I would just get a 1gb SD card to use for your sampling (I'm assuming you would delete them as frequently as you are adding them).  This way you could just plug the SD card directly into your computer, drop the new music files (separating by album if needed), and you're good to go.  From the main menu on Rockbox select Files, and the top item on the list should be the SD card.  Inside it will read them however you have them organized.

also: major kudos for the strongbad avatar, quad!

[painkiller]

It is even simpler than that, there's no need to make separate files for albums:

Quickest way is to reserve a micro SD for this stuff. Set "Sort Directories" to "By Newest Date". Then you have always the newest folder (=album, the one that was copied last onto the SD) at the top of the listing.

This is just a workaround, but no coding involved