Both the grouping and sorting options are self-explanatory in most cases. However, there are some cases where you should take a closer look or where there are additional configuration options.

Albums

In Coverflow, and possibly in Tree View, the files in the Media Library are grouped by "Album". It may sound strange - but this is not as simple as it sounds.

For a physical music collection on CD or vinyl, the question of what constitutes "an album" is relatively straightforward: all the tracks on that disc, or all the tracks on the two discs that are in one case, if applicable. With files that are located in different folders and which can be moved and copied at will, this is not quite so clear.

With Nemp 5 you can therefore decide how Nemp should define an "album". This definition is then used uniformly in the tree view for the "Album" layer, and also for the coverflow. The following options are available - and each has advantages and disadvantages. Choose the option that best fits the structure of your music collection.

1. property "Album"

Actually it would be obvious to take the property "Album" from the metadata (e.g. ID3 tags) for this. But this leads to problems, if you have "Best of" albums of several artists in your music collection. These would then be combined into one album, which is certainly not desired.

2. properties "Album" and "Artist"

The obvious correction to this problem would be to include the artist as well. This would neatly separate different "best of" albums. But then compilations are torn apart instead. Also music albums, where single tracks were created in collaboration with other artists, and these artists are also entered in the "Artist" field, will be torn apart by this.

If the "Album Artist" field is (almost) always set in your music files, then you can maybe select this option without negative effects (see next paragraph a little further down).

3. property "Album" and "Directory"

This option assumes that you manage the files of your music collection like a physical music collection. This should be the case in most cases (more or less), so this is the default setting. A problem may still arise with self-created sampler directories if you do not adjust the metadata in the copied files and set the album information to, for example, "Holiday 2022".

4. property "directory"

With this setting, the metadata of the files is completely ignored, and Nemp orders the files purely according to the directory structure on the hard disk. For the display, Nemp nevertheless tries to determine a common album name from the metadata of the "albums" found in this way.

For this choice you can select the option "Allow albums with multiple CDs". In this case subfolders like "CD 1" and "CD 2" will be combined into one album. You can also extend the list of folder names that should not be interpreted as an album of their own by adding names like "Disc". In this case, specify only the base names. Nemp automatically ignores the contained number, but only up to a maximum of 9 CDs inclusive.

5. property "Cover"

This method was used in earlier versions for the coverflow. Nemp determines a cover for each title. First the cover information from the metadata is used. If there are none, an image file is taken, which probably contains a cover for this title. All titles, for which the same cover was found, are then interpreted as one "album". The titles for which no cover can be found are separated by directories.

This procedure usually works quite well. However, it leads to unexpected behavior if only single tracks of an album contain image information in the metadata, or if in concept albums all tracks have their own cover in the metadata. Likewise, copies of individual tracks (e.g. for self-created samplers) continue to be assigned to the original album.

Album-Artists

In many (but by far not all) Mp3 files not only the field "Artist" is set, but also the additional field "Album Artist".

When grouping by "Artist", this field can be prioritized. This prevents that single tracks of an album, where other artists are involved, can still be displayed together, if the respective album artist is selected in the tree view.

For some samplers, the album artist is explicitly set to "Various Artists". This special case can be ignored during prioritization. This will group the titles of the artists represented on the compilations with their other titles.

Compilations

When grouping by album, it is a useful option to sort them primarily by artist (or album artist). As a second sorting attribute, the year of release can be selected. For compilations, where usually no common artist can be determined, this leads to different compilation series being mixed up.

If you want to have all releases of a compilation series displayed one after the other even when sorting by "year of release", you can switch to sorting by the title of the album (i.e. of the compilation) for this case. Since compilations are usually numbered consecutively, the sorting according to the year of publication remains the same.