I don’t like current media players (windows media player, itunes, whatever). Winamp is my favorite, because though it has a media library, you can turn it off, and use it as a really simple media player, which is nice. I wish media players could read my mind when it comes to organizing media.
Here’s what I want:
1. All tracks on a CD are related by Album Name and Primary Artist name. Soundtracks, collections, etc. should use Various Artists or something simliar as the Primary Artist.
This makes it possible to have….
2. Two ways of grouping - as individual tracks, and as complete albums.
3. When grouping by complete albums, you can sort by Album Title, or Primary Artist. It makes sense to do this, since a lot of people keep their CDs on the shelf in alphabetical order by artist.
4. Allow sorting by multiple fields - 1st by Artist, then by Album, or release date, or whatever
5. When grouping by artist, have subgroups for the albums on which their tracks appear.
6. When doing 5., have an option or some way of showing only their songs on each album, or the entire album - If i want to hear only the Aerosmith songs off the Armageddon soundtrack, that’s all I want to see in the list. Don’t make me pick the list of all their songs, or the entire Armageddon album, and select individually the tracks I want.
7. For multi-disc albums, group them together. (an option to do this is fine.) It’s stupid having to select Physical Graffiti Disc 1 and Physical Graffiti Disc 2 when they’re one complete album. Put the whole thing together (obviously sorted by disc, don’t put both track 1’s together) but have the option to expand the whole album into each disc individually, in case i do want to play only one disc.
I think i’ll go home, i’ll finish this later…