noise

sure, it can do all of that and then some.

with custom title formatting, you can sort your music however you like. i use a heirarchical system - i choose an artist in the top panel, then one of their albums below. but these panels can be set up however you like - years, decades, genres, file types, bitrates - absolutely anything.

or, you can go for a tree view like in Zarko's config. again, you can set up the nodes however you want. it's all based on your tags, so it's incredibly flexible, and it all updates automatically.

you also get lots of flexibility in the main view. look at mine - the "I Be The Prophet EP" is actually by Starving Souls, but since it's just a name that Tricky used for that one EP, i set %album artist% to Tricky. i have foobar set to show %artist% after a song name in brackets, and in lighter text, but only if a %album artist% track is present. so in other words, compliations will show up under regular albums in the tree, sorted by %album artist%, but in the playlist view, i can still see the artist of each track.

to summarize - foobar can do just about anything

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my flac collection

Guybrush

Thanks for your answers I might check out foobar one day soon and see how I like it.

I try to keep a high level of quality with my collection in the way I tag and organize files and so on, but I have to admit that genres are a bit of a problem. They're not very well defined and the dumbasses who came up with file tags only have 1 space for genre. It would make so much more sense to allow for more genre tags so that you could have supergenre and subgenres f.ex per file. Example, a file could be tagged as "Jazz" (supergenre) and "Big Band" (subgenre). Then you could sort stuff by supergenres and then subgenres in a hierarchy for example.

With the way it is now, genre tags in my collection is mostly just a badly structured mess. I don't know how many genres are in there. I think the best thing for me to do would be to come up with a list of supergenres and try to sort everything by those.

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Zarko

This applies to any media player really, but couldn't you just tag things genre wise as....

f.e.
ambum 1 - Jazz/Big Band
ambum 2 - Jazz/Big Band
ambum 3 - Jazz/Big Band
ambum 4 - Jazz/Big Band
ambum 5 - Jazz/nu-jazz
ambum 6 - Jazz/nu-jazz
ambum 7 - Jazz/nu-jazz

This would just be organised alphabetically, and have the exact same effect as you would want, no?

I use genres loosely, and mainly because its just plain easy.

Guybrush

The idea I had in mind was that a media player should be able to do something like this, expanding on your own example :

• Genres :
  • Jazz
    • Big Band
      • Album 1
      • Album 2
        • Song 1
        • Song 7 (ex. the genre only applies to a couple of the songs on the album)
      • Album 3
      • Album 4
    • Nu-jazz
      • Album 5
      • Album 6
      • Album 7

Since this information is not supported by the tags I know, I'm guessing this is not really something media players can do, but I like things being organized and would like to see something like this - at least support for it. As for my own collection and what to do with it, yeah - I was basically thinking of something like you presented.

What I would like to do first is come up with a set of super-genres like jazz that can describe all the music I have in my library.

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noise

you can do that with foobar too

you can probably just use hyphenated genre tags (Jazz - Big Band), then when building your tree, use foobar's amazing scripting to split it into nodes. i'm guessing the $replace function could be used for this. might have to check on the foobar forums to be sure. (i know for certain that Media Monkey can do this, i had my tags set up like this while i was using it as my main player a few years back).

look here for more info - this "Title Formatting" can be used throughout foobar, in everything from playlist columns to status bar text.

Foobar2000:Title Formatting Reference - Hydrogenaudio Knowledgebase

as a fallback, foobar lets you create your own custom tags. anything you want. you can't expect other players to be able to read them, but as long as you use foobar, you can use them just fine.

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my flac collection

lucifer_sam

here's mine:

Attached Thumbnails

 

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noise

new and shiny! this updated version of my config really shows off the customization powers of foobar. i changed to the Columns UI interface which offers a lot more control over how things look. i'm pretty excited about where it's going



L = Lyrics. a blue music note is shown in this column if lyrics are present.
RG = Replay Gain. left is track, right is album. check marks if it has been calculated and written to tags.
PC = Play Count. just started this, so most tracks are set at zero.

bitrate column is color coded. blends from red (128 and below) to green (320 and higher) depending on the value.

artist bios are automatically fetched from last.fm, and clicking on the bio panel switches to info about the currently playing album, also automatically fetched.

track ratings can be set with global hotkeys (ctrl+number)

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my flac collection

Guybrush

Found a way to do it in Winamp too I'll just use the category tags for super genres, then leave genre as they are.

I'll give Foobar a shot, though. The customization possibilities sounds like it might be fun.

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Kirby

I would probably love Foobar if I had the patience to make it look like that.

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noise

made some little changes, cleaned it up a bit
i love foobar

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my flac collection