Can we display ALL Albums within a given Genre (using Tagcache viewing)?

[lalittle]

I'm using tagcache to browse songs by tags on a 5G iPod.  Is there any way to quickly display a list of ALL Ablums within a given Genre (i.e. is there any way to do this without doing a "Search By..." in Rockbox)?

With the original Apple firmware, when you select a Genre, there is an "All" selection at the top of the list of Artists.  By selecting this, you can see ALL the albums for ALL the artists within this Genre.  This is a great feature for browsing albums that have multiple artists such as Soundtracks, Jazz, Blues, or Classical collections.  It allows you to peruse albums within a certain Genre, and get ALL the songs for any album even if they were done by different artists.  Rockbox can select "All Tracks" within a given Genre, but I don't see any way to peruse and play all "Albums" instead.

Can Rockbox do this, or am I correct in assuming that it cannot?  I added a feature request for this, but nobody has responded.  This seems like an obvious omission from Rockbox to me, so I'm curious why nobody else has asked for this (at least I cannot find any other discussion on this at the moment.)

Thanks,

Larry

[bascule]

You can edit the .rockbox\tagnavi.config text file to display almost anything you want. Try adding these two lines:

Code: [Select]

"Albums by genre" genre : album : title = "%02d-%s" tracknum title
"Artists by genre"    genre    : artist : album : title = "%02d-%s" tracknum title

This will display a genre list first then, respectively, albums and tracks or artists then albums then tracks

[bluebrother]

This should work by adding an appropriate entry to tagnavi.config. Haven't tested, but look at the TagCache wiki page which explains the tagnavi.config syntax.

From that page:
album ? genre = "Ballads" & artist = "AC-DC" will only show the albums that contain ballads by AC-DC

[lalittle]

Thank you -- that should get me started on what I want.

Just to clarify, do I understand correctly that you need a seperate entry for each "order" you want to browse by?  In other words, unlike the original Apple firmware, where you can select "All" at the top of the list of artists and see all albums from all artists within the current genre, with Rockbox, you have to create a seperate entry if you want to do this.  For example, with Rockbox you need one entry to browse by Genre>Artist>Album, and another, seperate entry to browse by Genre>Album (i.e. ALL albums within a Genre.)

Thanks again for your help -- there's a LOT to learn about this.

Larry

[lalittle]

One other question:'

The wiki page I found on tagnavi.config seems to use a different syntax that what is quoted above -- i.e. the wiki page shows brackets around the entries, but the examples above do not.  Am I looking at an outdated page, or missing something, or

Thanks again,

Larry

UPDATE:  I just followed the syntax from the actual tagnavi.config on the iPod, and it works as you said.  I renamed the existing "Genre" to "Genre/Artist," and created a new entry labeled "Genre/Album," which allows me to browse as I wanted.  I also deleted a couple of the existing entries that I don't use.

Can I just keep a copy of this on my system and copy it over to the iPod whenever I update the build (i.e. will the syntax remain the same from build to build?)

Also, are all the extra spaces on the lines just to get everything to line up in the text viewer?

THANKS again for helping out with this.  It's working great.

(Now all I need is an updated scrolling patch for the iPod with the newer builds, and I'll be good to go.)

Larry

[bluebrother]

the wiki page shows brackets around the entries, but the examples above do not.

usually means to replace the with your values, i.e. is meant to be replaced by the artist name you're searching for. F.e. if I want to search for Dido, becomes Dido in my line.

Can I just keep a copy of this on my system and copy it over to the iPod whenever I update the build (i.e. will the syntax remain the same from build to build?)

TagCache is still under development so the syntax may change though it is unlikely it gets changed heavily. So there shouldn't arise problems (and if the syntax changes you just need to adjust the tagnavi.config -- shouldn't be a big deal)

Also, are all the extra spaces on the lines just to get everything to line up in the text viewer?

AFAIK yes.

[Llorean]

Isn't there an All Tracks option in TagCache lists now? I thought that was implemented...

[lalittle]

Isn't there an option in TagCache lists now? I thought that was implemented...

What would I look for, and when was this implemented?

Thanks,

Larry

[Llorean]

I misunderstood your question. TagCache doesn't work well with albums by multiple artists simply because it cannot assume that an album is the same album just because it has the same name, and there isn't a really good way for marking it as the same album unless someone implements the use of the sorting tags to go along side the currently used tags (which can be thought of as 'display' tags, really)