A Gallery is "meta data" which isn't comprised of real music data but pointers to it.
Galleries have two main objectives :
1. Group Albums into any grouping you like;
2. Access such a group as one "library" while the original music data may be scattered over many disks.
Ad 1.
En example is "Jazz". However, when Rhoda Scott is regared a Jazz artist, she is also a woman and thus can be grouped into "Women" besides "Jazz". Also she plays the Hammond, so that coul be a third group to obtain her albums in.
The number of groups - or Galleries is unlimited.
Galleries are just normal folders. See an example here :
They contain all the data to let you select the albums from the Library Area as if it were Original Albums and can do everything and all with them as if they were.
Now how to create such a Gallery ? Look here :
Quite a few things can be seen in there;
First off we see at the bottom that a G:\WAV\PS\Phuture is shown (never mind the WAV which isn't even correct). But it shows that this album is obtained somewhere regardless its genre (which I like to denote "Ambient". You can also see in the left pane that I clicked on this one album which is the reason why only that one albums shows in the Library Area (the middle pane after clicking the [ L ] on top).
You can also see that it is right in the middle of Phil Collins which isn't much Ambient. IOW, after ripping my albums I did not care much where to put them. However, in the end I do because I want to group them (hence at finding them I want to see this in an "Ambient" grouping) and I will create a Gallery for that.
I rightclicked on the Coverart in the middle pane, and chose Add to Gallery. Then I click on the "Select ..." you see there.
Explorer opens and I navigate to the main Gallery entry I created earlier on (this is named "Galleries" in my case, but can be anything) and I see that I have an Ambient entry already. When not I'd create it with the Make New Folder button in the bottom left.
So I click the Ambient entry (folder) and click OK.
So that worked.
Now, without having Galleries yet, your Music Root in Settings will have been set to some "Original Location" (where the albums are stored physically on disk. Could be like this :
But when I work with Galleries, it should be something like this :
Remember the first picture in this Tutorial where you can see that "Galleries" is the root of all the Gallery Folders, and Ambient is just a sub folder of that. Now :
The [ M ] button you see at the mouse arrow always goes to the Music Root as set in settings. When I click that, now this appears :
I already had albums obtained in Galleries, so the whole list of them shows in the Library Area. Notice that this is obtained from C:\Galleries\ (see at the bottom) and that the Original Locations are not accesed for it.
Notice that the list starts with "Ambient" albums, but this is just coincidence because it starts with A and the sequence is alphabetical.
When I now minimize the list by means of typing "phuture" in the field near the bottom, you see the album I just obtained in the Ambient Gallery indeed appear.
Notice : You see it twice because at least one track of it was (earlier) obtained by me in the Demo Gallery. So here you have the "Rhoda Scott" example of an album being obtained in more than one Gallery.
Now watch out :
*Because* I asked for my albums at the root level (C:\Galleries\) I'll have them *all* in the Library Area. This is the most convenient for various Library functions. But of course I obtained the album in Ambient for a reason. So :
Now I clicked the "Ambient" entry in the left pane and in the Library Area I now have my Ambient albums only. Also watch the paths shown under the Coverart, which now do now show \Demo\ or \Ambient\ itself anymore, which is just because I selected the \Ambient\ out of it.
Lastly also watch this after re-selecting my Gallery root :
Now too I have all the Ambient in the Library Area, but this time because I entered it as a Search critirion.
A last notice :
When you already have your albums neatly orhanized in groups there is still the reason of being able to access all from one location : your root Gallery. This is not only for the conveniency of finding that one album of which you don't know in which group it has been put, but also for several Library functions which act upon all of your albums in one go.
