MediaMonkey forum

Folks;

I like the "Choose tree nodes", but I haven't figured out a useful way to use filters and views.

Can anyone give any clarification by way of examples?

I use the filter views based on file editing, playlist creation/editing, syncing reviews, audiobooks and a now playling filter. Each one has columns and nodes based on the criteria that is needed for the filter view. For example, the now playing filter only has the artist, album, title and genre columns, and the playlist, title, genre nodes as well as the magic nodes, play history and last 100 scripts. The filter views is my favorite feature of MM3.

Nyn

Yes, I have started to enjoying the new filter functionality as well.

I have made a Playing Mode filter with very few nodes and columns visible.
Then I have a Cleaning mode with almost all nodes and totally different columns visible.

But I don't "filter" anything so the name is a bit misleading

It's a great feature!

Bex wrote:But I don't "filter" anything so the name is a bit misleading

It's a great feature!

I agree, the name should just be Views or maybe Filtered Views. It might minimize some of the confusion.

Nyn

Filters are absolutely fantastic! My media server holds pop / rock music, classical music and spoken word comedy shows and podcasts and you need different nodes and different columns for each of those.

For example for classical music you usually want to search by composer and the CD databases will often (if you can find them at all) fill in the soloist in the "artist" tag. It's very frustrating trying to find Mendelssohn's violin concerto by the artist tag if it's filed under Y for Yehudi Menuhin.

So a classical filter / view is vital and in MM2.5 the customisable nodes was a main reason for going for MediaMonkey (magic nodes enabled me to have a classical node that only picked out tracks with "classical" in the genre). In MM3 the views are even better because of the customisable columns. I've never come across any other media player that will do this. Support for multiple tags also helps because you can filter by tag "contains" a text string so I can select all classical music even though the tags are "Classical; Baroque", "Classical; Romantic" etc. Then under genre I can select which type of classical music I want.

The same goes for fitering out stuff. I've got several CDs of radio show comedy sketches (Mitchell and Webb for one if you're interested) where some of the tracks are literally seconds long and most are rarely more than a minute or two, so I'm up to a well over hundred tracks by one artist. That really clogs up your screen unless you can filter out any genre containing "Comedy" from your main music playing view.

Similarly as other posters have said, when you're just playing music you are not that interested in track length, bitrate, volume, path, filename etc etc so you want a nice clean view but if you're having a bit of a re-organise then it's useful to be able to flick to a different view without screwing up your favourite settings.

I love it BUT and this is really annoying, there are no easy shortcuts to change views (or not that I can find). This is a bit of an oversight but can be forgiven at the outset as views are such a step forward anyway. I use MM3 on a media pc in the living room run through the TV and operated by a remote. A keyboard shortcut (so that I can program it into the remote) would be very useful to change from rock to classical when the mood takes me without having to dig into the menus using the keyboard or, God forbid, use a mouse. I have submitted this last issue to the wishlist but if anyone has any ideas on how to do it with scripts, I'd be a happy man.

SimonB wrote:Filters are absolutely fantastic!

I want to thank everyone who responded. I have to say my problem with understanding views was more with the user interface to setting views than with the feature itself. As SimonB requested, the view setting features certainly need to be addressed and perhaps then it will become more obvious how to use this new feature.

I can see a tree of views being more user-friendly than the current tree of node types.

I have a filter called "Quarantined Music", defined by the following rule:
'Path/Filename' contains 'H:\Quarantine'
I put my incoming music in this H:\Quarantine folder, and I use "Quarantined Music" view to edit/tag/clean up the new files.
When I'm done, I just select the songs and use Auto-organize feature, with a well defined mask, to move the songs to definitive location, in H:\Library folder.

Then I switch to normal "General Music" view.

Works a treat!

I'm a little confused by the whole filtering aspect. Does it change automatically based upon the content, or do I manually need to switch it? If so, then I agree that there should be a quick way to pick the filter I want applied in the "view".

I couldn't find much documentation on how to actually use the filters.

SimonB, on my MM3, right under the File menu item is a sort of megaphone icon with a down mark to its right. If I click the down mark I see a list of all my filters - I can just select the one I want. Very quick and easy.

I use filters because I keep my music in two formats - Flac for my main library. I do all my tagging there. I convert the Flac library to mp3 for, well, various reasons. So, the default filter is everything which is fine, but, then I have a filter for just Flac and one for just MP3 - very nice.

MacQ wrote:SimonB, on my MM3, right under the File menu item is a sort of megaphone icon with a down mark to its right. If I click the down mark I see a list of all my filters - I can just select the one I want. Very quick and easy.

I use filters because I keep my music in two formats - Flac for my main library. I do all my tagging there. I convert the Flac library to mp3 for, well, various reasons. So, the default filter is everything which is fine, but, then I have a filter for just Flac and one for just MP3 - very nice.

Great tip, thanks, I've never used the Navigation Toolbar before.

Nyn

I have all the hits from the late 50 to the late 80s tagged with "Pop Hits" in the occasion field. In another field I have some information on what number it was such as "#01 006 03 07 11 12 01/08/66" which means it hit number 1 it was the #6 song of the year, then some numbers to indicate how long it stayed #1, top ten, top 40 and top 100, and the date it peaked. I just filter occasion on pop hits, and when I go to the year there are nothing but the hits of the year, which can be sorted in order. Works very well.

Thanks Macq but I've seen the toolbar. It's OK but I try not to use a mouse. Keyboard shortcuts are so much quicker. This particularly true on my media PC where I'm using a remote and getting the mouse just to change views would be a pain. I'd like to be able to drop down a list using a shortcut and select either by number or by scrolling. You can do just about everything else by keyboard why not views?

gege wrote:I have a filter called "Quarantined Music", defined by the following rule:
'Path/Filename' contains 'H:\Quarantine'
I put my incoming music in this H:\Quarantine folder, and I use "Quarantined Music" view to edit/tag/clean up the new files.
When I'm done, I just select the songs and use Auto-organize feature, with a well defined mask, to move the songs to definitive location, in H:\Library folder.

Then I switch to normal "General Music" view.

Works a treat!

Yes, that's a great tip! I now rip to an "incoming" folder on my local laptop. When I'm happy with the tagging I use auto-organize to move them to the proper store on a NAS drive. That way, if I'm re-ripping something then I can find it on the NAS and delete it while it is ripping to the local drive without getting confused as to which file is which.

In latest build (1134) you can assign hotkeys to your filters. Simply open properties/Hotkeys, select "new hotkey", choose hotkey and in list select your filter.