Danni, Ian - I know that you guys think that it's the same, but trust me, there is a gapingly large difference between the two. That screenshot I posted above is just the tip of the iceberg, because as I said that's when I had a very small collection of music (probably right around 10 gigs). Now that I've got my full collection of 100 gigs and over 14,000 tracks, it's not a very functional option.

Yes, I do group my albums by /artist/album/ or just /album/ for multiple artists, but why should I have to switch from one to the other whenever I want to view an album with various artists on it, or put up with an extensively long list of albums when having it configured by /artist/album/ will probably make the library list about 5 times shorter? Yes, it is essentially a file browser, which is set up exactly how people like Wujek and I like our music to be sorted. There is no other way that I've found that works well with such large collections because the list either gets gummed up with unnecessary artists with just one track or makes finding music quickly a difficulty. Try finding a movie soundtrack and all the tracks on that album while in /artist/album mode quickly and you'll see what I mean. You have to switch from /artist/album view to just /album/ view, and then back, which is an unnecessary hassle, in my opinion.

Please don't misunderstand my post, I just want you to understand why this is an issue for people with large collections. Thanks for your time!

Sounds like a good idea!

Wiping out the file browser tab and integrate it in the collection view...yes, all for it! 

Any chance that we'll see an implementation of this any time soon? Honestly, the lack of a music player that fits my needs is probably the largest reason that I haven't returned to using Linux and went back to XP, and as much as I would like to change that, until there's a player that works I probably won't.

I'd love to see this as well.

Yes yes! I think this would make Amarok quite usable for my collection - I similarly have over 13600 songs and have the same problem!

The biggest differences between Amarok's current file tab and a true directory view are:
- it currently isn't a tree view (a tree view is very important to my idea of usability in this situation)
- root directory of file view is /, instead of the root directory of the music library. You can get lost navigating through your entire computer instead of just having the subdirectories of your music collection displayed in a tree view
- single clicking opens a directory currently. I think double clicking should play the contents of a folder, clicking the tree's + opens the directory for further viewing.

An alternative would be to allow customized organization strings for the collection view...so that you could specify "Group By - First Level" to be "dir:/home/username/Music/%1" or some such code so that that one level of directories divides up all the artist/albums beneath them (Second level Artist, Third, Album)
[bunnyfly]

After discovering the Magic Nodes script for MediaMonkey, I've found another solution for the problem that might be easier to implement, as long as the user's tags are correct - Sort by the Album Artist ID3 tag. I'm not sure if this is currently possible, but by putting the artist who made the whole album, or in case of soundtracks the name of the album, in the field, you can sort in essentially the same format. As I'm guessing that this would be easier to add in rather than an entire overhaul of the folder view, I figure I'd throw the idea out there.

Here's what the Magic Nodes implementation looks like in MediaMonkey