Working with the Album Browser

Introduction

The Album Browser is the ultimate way to view all your digital music albums as if they were on your shelf, with complete album picture support. As the name implies, the Album Browser is focused on complete albums. Each album you have is shown with its cover to the left as well as additional summary information (Total length, total tracks, publisher, rating, release year and more).

Selecting or multi-selecting albums offers several opportunities to change information for the album, such as the album name, the publisher and the release type.

You also have the full capability to update the album covers including downloading multiple covers using the available plug-ins.

The Album Browser is a good starting point in Helium Music Manager since it is quite precise in its functions.

You can also play an entire album by either double clicking it or selecting it and simply pressing the play button at the bottom toolbar.

Tasks

• Filtering albums
• Working with templates, groupings and custom sorting
• Working with multiple selections

• Useful tools

Filtering Albums

Filtering out albums ("hiding" albums that you are currently not interested in) is important, because it lets you work with fewer albums at a time, and thus increases the speed in Helium Music Manager.

To filter out items in the Album Browser, you first need to show the filter panel.
Activate it by selecting View | Album Filter.

 

The Album Browser filter will appear at the top of the Track List in the Album Browser:

Filtering on database fields

The topmost part of the Album Browser filter contains three rows of controls in which you can set several arguments to be matched.
The first input control allows you to narrow your results to a specific library and/or volume. Press the down arrow to see all your available Libraries and Volumes in a tree view.

The other two rows allow you to create an expression based on a criteria. The first of the two input controls allows you to set a specific database field.
You can select from almost all fields represented in Helium Music Manager's database such as rating, album, artist and year to mention just a few.
When selecting a field, the arguments (bottom line of input controls) will change depending on the type of the field selected.

If for example you select Rating (as in the example screen above), you can select a specific operator in the leftmost control. In this case you can change between:

• Is
• Is not
• Is at least
• Is at most
• Is empty
• Is not empty

If you select another field such as Artist, which is a so called textual field, you can select from the following operators:

• Contains
• Does not contain
• Is
• Is not
• Starts with
• Ends with
• Is empty
• Is not empty

Selecting a value field such as Rel. Year will allow you to use the following operators:

• Is
• Is not
• Is at least
• Is at most
• Is empty
• Is not empty

 
You can create very powerful filters by simply entering data into these input fields.

Advanced Filtering

Apart for the filtering options described above you can use the Query Editor to create Advanced Queries to use as filters. Advanced Queries supports multiple filtering fields and operators and are very powerful.

For more information about the Query Editor, click this link.
 

Filtering on release types, album rating, pictures or lent out

The bottom part of the Album Browser filter contains quick access to a few filter criteria that can be freely combined with the other filter criteria (Database fields).

 

 
You can choose one or more release types that your albums must match by clicking the Release Type button, and selecting the appropriate release types from the drop-down menu.
 
The Album Rating drop-down menu works in a similar way to the release type filter. It will filter out all albums that don't match the selected album rating.
 
The pictures filter allows you to show albums either with or without pictures. When both buttons are checked or unchecked all items will be shown. You can access the pictures filter using the following two buttons:
 
The lent out filter works in a similar manner to the pictures filter, with the difference that it uses data from the lent out field for each album when the filter is applied. You can access the lent out filter using the following two buttons:
 

Working with templates, groupings and sorting

The Album Browser comes with the powerful facility to group albums into one level.
In the example picture to the right a grouping on release year is in use.
 
By using the different groupings available, you can have your albums automatically arranged; which will help you to get a better overview of the albums you have.
 
To change/activate the grouping you need to modify the active template. Open the album browser's template editor by right-clicking in the list of album and click Album Sorting and Grouping | Customize from the context menu.

 
The dialog that is shown allows you to control the sorting of the list of the albums, a possible grouping, in which order the data should be visually presented, as well as the data that should be displayed.
Each template that you create using this dialog can of course be stored and loaded whenever needed. Be sure to learn to take advantage of grouping and sorting, because they are very powerful features that help you to organize and locate your albums more easily.
 

 

Working with multiple selections

Helium Music Manager enables you to work with the contents from several selected albums at once, or the selected albums themselves.

When multi selecting is active in the Album Browser, a checkbox will be shown to the left of each album. It's checked state will determine whether an album is selected or not. The image to the right shows one album which is selected, and one which is unselected.

If you are working with album grouping, you can quickly select or deselect all albums within a group by checking or unchecking the grouping item. If only a subset of the albums within a album group are selected, the album grouping items check state will be "mixed". This is represented with a filled square as shown in the picture to the right.

When you have selected multiple albums you can use most of the available tools from the album browser's context menu on all of these albums at once. For example, you can remove multiple albums by selecting the albums that you would like to remove and then clicking Remove... from the context menu.

More tools are described below.

Displaying contents from multiple albums in the Track List.

When you have multiple albums selected in the Album Browser you can show all of the albums contents in the Track List by clicking Browse & Search | Browse Selected Albums from the context menu.

Useful tools

There are a couple of valuable tools available in the Album Browser. Most of them work with multiple selections, which can help you to automate your tasks. All tools are available from the context menu, shown when you right click in the Album Browser. A few of the tools are listed below.

• Download Album Information will help you to download album pictures and reviews using a plug-in for one or more selected albums.
• Tools | Rename Album will help you to rename the album, both in Helium Music Manager's database and the music file tags.
• Set Release Type will help you to change the release type for one or more selected albums.
• Enqueue and Play will help you to either enqueue and play or enqueue the selected albums into Helium Music Manager's Active Playlist.
• Select is a menu which contains several helper functions to quickly select or deselect multiple albums.

• Lend Out/Not Lent Out will help you to manage/record the lending out of any of your albums.