Grouping by other tag fields such as Publisher (Record Label), Comment or VBR/CBR status

[Derek Ferric]

How's it going, Clementine Crew?

Firstly, I really want to thank all the developers of Clementine Music Player for giving the world such a great library manager for audio files, particularly for Linux (Ubuntu) users, a platform which I am currently slowly getting to grips with which doesn't have a lot of choice in this department.

I just wondered if there has ever been any consideration given to extending the Advanced Grouping feature to include more criteria to group files by? Currently we can group files by File Type and Bitrate which is pretty cool for quickly finding out which old rips we could probably do with ripping in higher quality now that hard disk space is much more affordable than at the beginning of the 21st century.

One thing I have noticed in grouping files by bit rate is that albums with Variable Bit Rate will not group stuff the same as those with Constant Bit Rate. I'd find it helpful if all VBR files were grouped by range rather than average bit rate per individual file, but I don't know how difficult that would be to implement.

However, the main reason I wanted to get in touch was to ask if there is or would ever likely be a way to group my entire library by less commonly used ID3 tag fields such as the Publisher (Record Label) or even Comment.

At the moment, if I have a few hundred files which have useless information to me in the Comment field (eg. Ripped by LAME) I have to manually select them all then batch remove the information from that field which can cause some instability in the application as it's working. It's not the end of the world and I will continue using it this way but I just wondered how tricky it would be to extend the options in the Advanced Grouping drop down menu to add all sorts of other fields to group by.

One very useful example would be to group by Publisher, particularly if you collect specialist genres where the record label itself can be an indicator of the style of music to expect. So for my mother she might be able to see all Motown releases grouped or I might be able to see all Good Looking Records releases grouped... Both labels which themselves have very distinctive flavours.

I am not a developer or I would perhaps attempt to solve this myself with some sort of hack or plugin (with permission of course) but have a lot still to learn about that side of things.

However, I didn't think it would hurt to float this idea on your forum in case there was a solution I hadn't noticed or any way of enhancing the application etc to accomplish this...

What I love most about your application is the option of three levels of grouping.

I find myself using File Type as the first level followed by Genre and then Artist, something I couldn't seem to do on iTunes or WindowsMediaPlayer which makes sorting my music so much easier, especially as the Organise Files feature allows much more customisation.

I prefer my Music folder sorted into Genres before anything else which took a lot more manual work before switching to Clementine. If there was an additional option to automatically sort stuff into folders based on the information in the Comment section, or whether files are CBR or VBR, that would be the icing on the cake for me! Just saying!

Thanks very much!

[Derek Ferric]

PS. Much more important than all of the above....

PLEASE could you change the BLUE of the track playing to a different BLUE/colour than the tracks in a playlist which you've just selected to batch edit metadata for cos I keep finding that I only edited one of what I thought was a selection of two or more.

Thank you guys, I love what you've built.

[Garthhh]

Try using smart playlists, which will do some of what you want directly, it will do large complex queries, limited by only your imagination
Like Itunes Clem has a group field, I also use the comment field as a user defined field
Editing large numbers of tags can cause things to lock up for some time while it processes, I find an outside tag editor to be helpful, I'm sure EasyTAG is in the ubun repository

[Derek Ferric]

Hhmmm... I haven't found this to work.