Is it possible to separate by Album, Alphabetically

[triVLSU]

Sorry, I don't usually ever venture to the winamp forum but I have a question that has been driving me crazy lately. I was curious if a plug in, or an option existed in winamp to be able to take my huge playlist and separate them by album, but keeping each band together. Basically, I'm one of those guys who enjoys listening to an Album from start to finish, the same way the artists made it.But I also like have everything on one huge playlist so I can change from artist to artist quickly or put it on shuffle if I'm in that kind of mood too. So my dilemma is that I don't have a way to sort the bands my name, while keeping each Album separate. I usually wouldn't mind going through manually and moving things into place, except that everytime I would add news CDs, I would have to do it all over again.

So to sum it up, I'm looking for a way to have my songs sorted by bands alphabetically, while keeping the track order the same from CD to CD. Any help whatsoever would be awesome.

[ricardobeat]

What version of winamp are you using?

That's that the Media Library is for! Right-click the main window, check Media Library. You have to add your playlist to the library (Library button -> Add Media).

All your songs will magically appear under Local Media - Audio, you can sort it by name, artist, album, track numbers...

[joeconstantine]

Two methods spring to mind.

The first is dependent on how your music is stored. If, like me, your mp3s are stored artist\album\track - artist - title (example: Ash\1977\01 - Ash - Lose Control.mp3) or something very similar, then in the playlist click misc > sort > sort by path and filename.

The second is dependent on your mp3s being tagged properly. If they are, navigate to preferences > titles > advance title formatting. Check "use advanced title formatting when possible" and copy the following string into the "advanced title display format" text box:

%artist% - %album% - %tracknumber - %title%

Now sort your playlist by title (meaning displayed title) and your songs will be listed by artist, then album, then track, then song. Happy days.

The ATF is quite flexible actually and can be told to skip fields if they hold no data, or use different separators, pad or cut fields to make your playlist look uniform, and lots more. Have a play about.