Album view splits by Artist

[FadeFx]

When i sort music by album, it still first sorts by artist, this is no problem with normal albums, but sampler and compilations are spread all over the place...

Imo it should then sort the albums by album title and leave the artist out in sorting.

[Biont]

Just to add my 2 cents: The current "Album" view is simply misnamed and I have been trying to put my thoughts about it into an issue for a while now (along with the intention to PR something, which is why I haven't done so due to a lack of time)

It should not be called Album view if the "top level grouping" is by artist.
Sure, tracks are displayed by album, but there is no alphabetical list of albums to be found which I would expect.

So what we would need is basically already described in #245: A new view that only displays albums. The current album view should maybe just be renamed to "Artists".

A different approach would be to make the "grouping by artist" toggleable, but knowing a bit about the template code, this could be a nice opportunity to start fresh while avoiding to pile up more complexity to the current view. It would also allow us to gradually improve the new view and keeping the current one intact.

The current view also makes it tough to implement filtering/sorting since you have 2 levels of hierarchy to account for. A flat list of albums displayed in a grid however would make it very easy to sort and filter them. (And quite a few requests for these features, with explanations on why it's currently hard to implement them can be found: #661, #662, #429 or #477 )

Another thing to note is that the current view works on the monolithic /collection endpoint while a separate album view would allow us to use the /albums endpoint which should be extended to support pagination (while sending the total amount of items as a response header).
While this would require quite some changes to allow lazy-loading more items on the fly, it would drastically reduce the duration of initial page loads and surely help with scrolling performance as well (especially if accompanied by a virtual scrolling solution, but that's another can of worms)

[paulijar]

this is no problem with normal albums, but sampler and compilations are spread all over the place...

What you should do, is to add the tag album artist to all your tracks belonging to a compilation. You can set it as "Various Artists" or whatever you like. Then the album will be kept intact. After all, that's what the album artist tag is intended for: to have a common nominator when album has tracks from several artists.

In the screen shot below, I have set album artist of the tracks shown as "Eri esittäjiä" (that's "Various artists" in Finnish) and the track artist to be the performer of the particular track. You can see how the track artists are shown after the the track title in this case.

[FadeFx]

That has helped, its quite an effort for a big collection, especially as there are albums by artists where there is one or two tracks with featured artists, this means i also have to find these albums and set the album artist name correctly, but if i know it works, it is well worth the effort.