Grouping Albums by type

[barho]

Hello, new user here.
For some artists, I have albums of differnt types: Studio Albums, Live Albums, Singles, Demos, etc...
I'd like to separate the Albums view by those types, and also have a specific order of appearance (for example, Studio Albums should appear before Live Albums and Singles).
Ideally, the album type would appear as a separator in the albums view, but I'd be ok with having to select an album type before seeing a list of albums.
If both those options are not applicable, I'd like to at least be able to sort the albums by album type (in a specific custom order as described above) and then by Date.

What would be the best approach to achieve this? and what settings would i have to change in MinimServer?

[simoncn]

Welcome to the MinimServer forum! All options for separation require you to add a tag to each album to specify the album type, for example:

AlbumType=Studio Album
AlbumType=Live Album
AlbumType=Single
AlbumType=Demo

In addition, you need to add AlbumType to the indexTags property. You can then do any of the following:

1) In the browsing index, select AlbumType to see all available album types, then select an album type to see all albums of that type

2) Configure the album.sortTags option of the tagOptions property to sort the albums list by AlbumType value. For example, you can set album.sortTags={AlbumType, Date, Album} to sort first by album type (alphabetical order, so Demo albums would come first), then by date, then by album name. It isn't possible to add a separator between different AlbumType sections.

3) As you don't want Demo albums to come first in the album list, you need to add another tag such as AlbumTypeSort and set this to the sort order that you want. You also need to set the tagValue property to AlbumType.value.sort={AlbumTypeSort} to activate your custom sort values. For example, to make studio albums come first you can set AlbumTypeSort=1 for all studio albums and set AlbumTypeSort=2 etc. for other album types. Doing this manually would be quite tedious and error-prone, so you can use the tag update facility to specify a rule for doing this automatically, as follows:

@AlbumType=Studio Album
+AlbumTypeSort=1
@AlbumType=Live Album
+AlbumTypeSort=2
@AlbumType=Single
+AlbumTypeSort=3
@AlbumType=Demo
+AlbumTypeSort=4

[barho]

Thanks a lot! Is there a benefit to adding a new Tag called AlbumType, vs using the standard Grouping tag?
My train of thought is that by using the Grouping tag, it might be more compatible with other systems.
I could always rename Grouping to Album Type in Minimserver's settings.

[simoncn]

The approach I described will work equally well if you use Grouping for the name of the "album type" tag. There is no need to rename Grouping to AlbumType in aliasTags.

The Grouping tag has a somewhat chequered history having been used for many different purposes, so it has a standard name but not really a standard meaning. It's fine to use it for this purpose.