Overview

The Music Views screen allows you to customize the way MediaPortal displays your music, for each database view:

Music Views Settings

To understand how Music Views work within MediaPortal, see Using MediaPortal > Browse Music > Music Views

This is one of the most important, and complex, music configuration screens, but it allows you tremendous control, all from a single window.

Note, Music Views are not supported when using Shares view. The default 'Shares' view will not allow albums to be viewed in order of track numbers without 'switching views' from within MediaPortal. You need to use another view for sorting to function.

For this section to function correctly, songs must be tagged properly using ID3 or similar tags and scanned into your Music Database

MediaPortal ships with some default views that should cover the requirements of the majority of users; but this screen gives you complete control over how your music is displayed to you.  You want an A-Z index page? You want to display a specific view of artists beginning with 'A' and have all their tracks sorted by duration?   This is the page where you can configure that.

View Definitions

The view definition screen looks complicated to start with but don't let that put you off!  It is divided into two sections with the top half listing the views themselves

Each of these rows reflects what will appear when you are listening to music within MediaPortal and choose the switch view menu button.

The columns are for localization, both actually contain the same data here but MediaPortal uses the numbers to convert to a local language. For example, the 'Localized code' 528 will be "Album Artists" in English but "Album Artistes" in French and "Artistas" in Spanish.   Basically these numbers can be ignored.

The order of views can be reorganized here.  To re-order the views simply click on a view or row with the mouse and drag it to the desired location.   To delete a view select it and click the delete view button.

Adding new views is dealt with below.

View Level Definitions

The bottom half of the screen defines how you want your view to work

The most important item here is the first column which tells MediaPortal how you want to access your music.  In the above example the view is defined to go from Album Artist => Album => Disc # => Tracks.   This means that when you open the view you will get a list of album artists and be asked to select one.   Then you will be presented with a list of albums for that album artist.  Next you will be presented with a list of Disc #s for that album by that album artist.   Finally you will be presented with a list of tracks for that Disc # for that album by that album artist.

The next three columns are for advanced uses so ignore that for now.

The Layout column defines how this level should look.  This allows you to choose the layout you prefer for each level of the view. 

The SortBy column defines how you want the data sorted.   You could for example change the list of albums to be sorted by year rather than album (alphabetically).

The Asc tick box changes which way the sort works.  When ticked the list will run from low to high (oldest to newest).   If not ticked it will run from highest to lowest (newest to oldest)

The remaining Skip option allows you skip a level if there is only a single entry.   This makes sense particularly for the Disc # level where you probably don't want to click on an album and then be presented with a single disc for that album, but if you click on an album with multiple discs you may want then to have a list of discs.

You can reorganize the levels, click to select one, drag the line to move it, press the Delete key to remove, and Insert key to add a new level.

Index Pages

Sometimes you have a very large collection and you may want to break down a list into smaller chunks.

This can be achieved using the following view definition with a Group operator

You can see here that the only difference to the view definition above is the first line.   This first line has the operator column set to group and restriction set to 1.  If you want an index page at any level then just replicate this.   If you have a view with an index, and you want to remove it, then simply click on the level with the group operator and press the Delete key.