At the moment there are two aspects of this I dislike -
The list is ordered with the most frequently listed composer first (not particularly useful or helpful)
Non alphabetical with Christian names first.
Like most of us who are classical music buffs, the christian names of composers are not particularly valuable as a search tool. One looks for BEETHOVEN, not Ludwig van Beethoven.
So, why cannot the focus on composers list them in alphabetical order with surnames listed first? But then maybe that is currently possible and I’m missing something?
If you’re talking about the Composers view, the sort can be by Name, Number of Compositions, Most Played (upper right-hand corner), ascending or descending.
In Settings, you also have the option to choose to sort by either first name or last name.
As I understand it, you’d like to be able to toggle that box between being ordered by number of albums and alphabetical ordering, retaining the setting for Composers name.
I’ve brought your post into Feature Requests and will change the title slightly so the devs can pick it up. Let’s flag @mike also and see if consistency of treatment of Composer name setting can be achieved here.
And with it possible to easily focus on a composer, it would then be useful to be able to narrow it down to select a subgroup using tags one has used. This would make locating a particular album much easier that using the search function, which like the one in Sooloos, is a bit limited.
Example:
Suppose I wished to find a particular disc of a Beethoven Quartet but, for the life of me, cannot remember the artist involved.
Focus Composers -> list of all the Beethoven recordings in the library (and that can be very large)
If I could then further specify a further focus on tags, and on the “Chamber” tag in particular, the list would be much reduced and I might then recognise the cover of the album in mind and then select it it listen to that work.
What is described above would also be an alternative way of listing all particular works for comparison (which could be better than the search function).
Example: Focus on Shostakovich -> “Concertos” would give a list of them to listen to to compare.
Very odd, unless your library really doesn’t have much Beethoven or the Composer tag is not populated properly in your files.
I did the same Focus query against my library and got back 100 or so albums, all of which were either solely Beethoven or contained tracks by Beethoven.
Of course, Beethoven was neither ‘Baroque’ nor ‘Early’, so you may have excluded a large number of albums that were classified something else (e.g., ‘Classical’, ‘Romantic’, ‘Symphonic’, etc.).
Focus
Composers
Beethoven
Then (the bit that kept eluding me) the symbol on the right of the heart top left which reveals all the tags
Select tag
-> 81 albums
An alternative way of skinning the cat might be to use Focus within the Compositions browser - there you have both the Forms (e.g. concerto, quartet) and Composer as main selection criteria?
or the Composer tag is not populated properly in your files.