Gallery - what is it?

Although I am not sure where you see something like a "Gallery section", I hope the below helps a bit.

First of all let's say a gallery is something like a showcase of what you have (on albums). But as often (museum, art), a gallery contains works of a specific type only. In our case this could be

Classical, Populair, Blues, Folk
but also
English, French, Portugese, World,
and also
Good Stuff, Throw away, New, Sortout
etc.

One album obviously may fit into several of these galleries, just because a French singing Folk group might be Good Stuff.

Galleries in XXHighEnd comprise of normal folder structures which you can view with Explorer as you are used to, although there's no real reason to do that. The point is though, that this way of working just integrates with the Windows OS, and since no additional (hidden etc.) data stores are used, you can manipluate them as normal folders (and files). Note though that "manipulate" comes down to searching/viewing only, because e.g. renaming/deleting etc. really should be done from within XXHighEnd because otherwise the consistentcy of things are violated.

A Gallery can me made from within XXHighEnd a.o. by means of rightclicking on an album in the Libarry Area, and appoint it to a folder which is equivalent to whatever it is you intend with it. E.g. c:\MyGalleries\Blues.
Here is a rather old page about this, but it will give you the idea : 0.9n and Galeries

Besides the obvious reaons of categorizing your albums as implied above, there are many more features, and some are very powerful not found anywhere else, mainly dealing with the huge piles of data this all can be about (think of many TeraBytes).

Without explaining all in detail and/or how to achieve things, here are some of the explicit benefits :

No need to worry about how to organize the original album folders and files; it is the Galleries you work with, and they are not dependend on the original data.
Similarly there is no limit to the size of the total data store, and as many disks can be connected as needed, and they can be of any mixed connection type. The only thing you work with is your "MyGalleries" main music root which is representative for one virtual drive containing all your music data.
The disks providing the music data (hence contain the original albums) need to be connected, but must be connected when an album is played from them (hence you can have more disks than connections, and you can swap disks when needed).
In a proper setup disks spin down when they are not used (generally SATA connected disks will). Because your Gallery will be on one disk only, only that disk will spin when browsing through the music data, and assuming this is your OS disk, this disk will spin anyway to serve the OS. Obvioudly when the OS is on a Solid State Disk, nothing will spin.
Only when an album is played, the disk holding the album will spinup, and that disk will spin down according to your settings (could be 1 minute I think). Btw, a provision which will take care of not even spin up the disk when a new track is loaded, is due.
PS: It was found that the less power consuming devices are on board, the better it is. Besides that, my 10 disks really need not to spin all the time.
Since the Gallery (root) behaves as one logical drive, many benefits come from that feature alone; Example : When I want to make a manual backup of the albums I added since the last backup (bound to a date/time), the whole set of feautures just allow for this, no matter on which of the disks the new album was stored.
Similarly, but almost more important, is that one command allows for the (permanent) conversion of WAV files to FLAC files (or the other way around) again unaccording where those files are. Keep in mind : thinking of the folder structures you might have, there's already no software around that can deal with that in one go, let alone doing so when all is spread over several disks. IOW, this is an inmense time saving feature, or better : base for many of similar stuff to you own imagination (but to be supported by XX hence to be created by me of course).
Important or not, your Gallery can be zipped and emailed around the globe, and may give insight to whoever you want about your music collection. But think of this example, assuming it is legal (and which is just a stupid example of the power of the Galleries) :
You can send the zip to your work's address, and overthere - where XXHighEnd runs just the same - you compare the Home Gallery with the one at work (hence you'd be comparing two collections), and the Album Compare feature will spit out the albums not present at work, but present at home. From that you create a new Gallery "FilesToCopy", and that Gallery is zipped back home again. At home you load that Gallery in the Library Area, and the only thing you need to do is "Copy Files" and appoint a sufficiently large target disk which you connect to your work PC (or copy the files to that PC somewhere). When you really want to keep your files in WAV all the time, you still could perform a Copy WAV To FLAC in order to fill up the disk mentioned, and at work the other way around : Copy FLAC to WAV. So, the transport medium has become FLAC, and you can transport twice as much because of this.
Remember, this is all press of a button stuff, no matter how scattered your music data is, assuming you made nice Galleries from it.
Since your Galleries always comprise of one Music Root (say, main folder) and all "genres" etc. are thereunder in sub folders, no matter you use Vista's search features, or just the XXHighEnd search features, when using the root as the source, all your albums will be at hand. This is the most convenient when looking for some (potentially) new album and whether you already have that (and trust me, when you have over 10,000 albums, you need that regularly). And no, there's not much to this when compared to Vista's search feature (when properly setup which is a tough job by itself), but then again, this works for one drive at a time, and you may have 10 or more ...
Generally, your specific way of working may require a special feaure, with an example of it here : Library sort order.
Remember, most of the features around the Galleries were born from my own needs, but this example is just one of those specific needs, and now when this requirement has been met, it saves much time, or even fulfills tasks not possible otherwise (ok, everything can be done, but with so much data things become just too much time consuming. IOW, don't hesitate to come forward with your needs.
As a very general "feature" counts that when you put your Galleries on the one fastest disk you have, you can deal with searching etc. in there the fastest way possible, just because this is not related to the original location.
Btw, a Solid State Harddisk is found to be the fastest to this matter, and this is hardly related to the "bulk transfer" times which are lower on a SSD opposed to e.g. SATAII because this is not about bulk transfer but many small accesses, just where the SSD is so good at. The net result (for me) is twice as fast at least. Also note that the OS, together with Galleries of over 10,000 albums worth of Gallery data, will easily fit on the now very much affordable 64GB SSD (I myself have 20GB left).

The downside of Galleries is that they are redundant, and that it needs XXHighEnd feautures for everything like Renaming, Deleting, Moving Gallery data, or original data for that matter. You can say that 50% of the necessities to this matter are in there now, but the other 50% is still lacking. This other 50% is mainly in the area of changing implied stuff by means of Windows Explorer, which really should incorporate the Gallery data. I hope to come up with solutions for that in the near future.

Peter

PS: Besides the running time of 30 minutes on average (per XXHighEnd startup), working with the Galleries is limited to 100 output items in the Gallery Area for the Demo version.

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