Sorting Your Collection

One of the most powerful features of Media Center's My Music interface is the capability to manage a large music collection using a wide variety of sorting and search techniques. From the My Music main menu, you can automatically sort your music collection by the following criteria:

• Album name

• Artist name

• Playlist name

• Song title

• Musical genre

• Keyword

Simply choose your sorting preference from the default Recent Music page (see Figure 14.3), which displays the audio you have most recently listened to.

Figure 14.3. The Recent Music display in My Music shows various items reflecting your most recent musical selections.

To sort by album, artist, playlist, song or genre, choose the corresponding tab on the left of the My Music screen. Each choice will reveal additional options for viewing and filtering the contents of your digital music collection.

Albums

Choosing the Album tab provides a list of the albums stored on you Media Center PC (see Figure 14.4). You can choose from the following options:

• Play This immediately begins playback of the currently listed items. Playback will occur in the order shown onscreen. When you select Play, the screen will change to the Now Playing display (see Figure 14.2).

• Shuffle This begins playback of the listed items in random order. The Now Playing screen will be displayed.

• View by List This is the default view for the Albums screen.

• View by Cover Shows your album collection using thumbnails of the album cover art (see Figure 14.5) that Music Center was able to retrieve from metadata stored online.

  Figure 14.5. When My Music is unable to locate an album cover graphic, it displays a generic graphic such as the picture of a stereo speaker shown here.

  

Figure 14.4. The dot that appears on the View by List tab indicates that My Music is displaying a list of all your albums.

Artists

Choosing Artists will display the initial Artists screen (see Figure 14.6), listing every artist on every track of every album in your collectionor at least all of those that were identified in Media Center's online metadata search.

Figure 14.6. The Artists screen lists recording artists in alphabetical order based on the first name, or the first word in the name of a music group .

If you select the View All tab from the Artists display page, My Music will show the View by List screen (see Figure 14.7). This screen also permits you to choose View by Cover, which will display a different view of Album cover thumbnails (see Figure 14.8).

Figure 14.7. The View by List screen shows all your albums, sorted by the artists' names .

Figure 14.8. The View by Cover screen shows thumbnails of all your album covers, but this time they are sorted in alphabetical order according to the artists' names.

Playlists

Sorting with the Playlists tab will bring up a list of the playlists you have created using Windows Media Player (see Chapter 16's section "Working with Playlists" for more details). As long as you have the most current version of Windows Media Player installed, you'll also have the option of choosing Auto Playlists, which displays a list of choices for playing back portions of your music collection (see Figure 14.9). The list offers an imaginative array of options to experience your songs in ways that only a computerized audio companion like Media Center can provide. These are the 15 Auto Playlist choices:

• Favorites 4 and 5 Star Rated

• Favorites Have Not Heard Recently

• Favorites Listen to at Night

• Favorites Listen to on Weekdays

• Favorites Listen to on Weekends

• Favorites One Audio CD Worth

• Favorites One Data CD-R Worth

• Fresh Tracks

• Fresh Tracks Yet to Be Played

• Fresh Tracks Yet to Be Rated

• High Bitrate Media in My Library

• Low Bitrate Media in My Library

• Music Tracks I Dislike

• Music Tracks I Have Not Rated

• Music Tracks with Content Protection

Figure 14.9. The Auto Playlists menu gives you an interesting set of ways to listen to your music collection.

The Auto Playlist function is dynamic. It constantly changes as you add new items to your music library. While it continuously notes these changes to your audio content, it's also keeping tabs on your listening habits, observing which tracks you listen to and when, as well as which ones you always skip over.

So what do you do if you like an Auto Playlist you've heard, and want to preserve itknowing full well that the next time you try it, it may be completely different? Just follow this procedure:

1. Close or minimize Media Center.

2. Open Windows Media Player from the Windows XP Start menu.

3. Choose Media Library from the menu on the left.

4. Select Auto Playlist in the directory tree pane to display all the choices.

5. Right-click on the Auto Playlist you want to keep.

6. Select Save as New Playlist, and a New Playlist dialog box will appear (see Figure 14.10).

   Figure 14.10. After you've saved your new playlist from the Auto Playlist choices in Windows Media Player, it will be added to the list of My Playlists.

   

7. Enter a name for the new playlist, and click OK.

Songs

Selecting the Songs tab will sort your audio collection by track. From the Songs page, you can select Play to listen to all the tracks in alphabetical order, or Shuffle to listen in random order.

Genres

The Genres tab brings up the Genres page (see Figure 14.11), displaying a list of the major categories into which My Music automatically sorts your audio collection, based on metadata for each track. The genres displayed will reflect the actual music content stored on your Media Center system, but here are some of the categories you may encounter:

• Classical

• Country

• Easy Listening

• Jazz

• Misc

• Other

• Rock

• Soundtrack

• World

Figure 14.11. From this view of the Genres display, simply click on the category you want.

tip

Want to speed up your search? Think about the wordor even just the part of a wordthat's most unique to the song, artist, or track you are looking for. Remember: When you're doing a keyword search, less really is more.

Keywords

To sort your audio collection by searching for a keyword in the album title, track, or artist name, select the Search tab and enter a word using your keyboard or the text-entry keypad on your remote control (see Figure 14.12).

Figure 14.12. If you're kicking back on the couch , there's no need to pull yourself up to your PC's keyboard just to do a keyword search in My Music.

The Music Search page displays a guide to the alphanumeric keys on your remote control. Just press the button that corresponds to the letter you want to enter. Each button represents three letters press once for the first letter, twice for the second letter, and three times to enter the third letter.

The Music Search feature looks at the entire contents of each listing to find a match for your search term , and it begins searching the moment you enter the first letter. As a result, you'll initially see items that contain only the first character you entered in the search field. For example, enter the letter Q, and Music Search will display all items that contain the letter Q. Enter an additional lettersuch as a Uand the display will show only the items that have those two letters in sequence, and so on. As you enter more letters, Music Search continues to narrow the search results.