Creating Advanced Media Views Using the Expand Search Modifier

Media Center 20 includes a new Search Language modifier, ~expand, which can be used to create some clever Media Views that filter your media in ways that were previously difficult or impossible to accomplish. This tutorial will show how to use this new feature to craft a few Media Views that are useful, and which demonstrate how to use it to expand what you can do with Media Center.

Please Note: The ~expand modifier was added in MC 20.0.106 and you must have this version or later to use this tutorial.

Background

Media Center's Library and Search Language operates on a per-file basis. When you issue a search, it evaluates every file in your Library individually, and deciding whether to include or exclude the file from the search results. You cannot evaluate, however, an entire [Series], [Album], or [Genre] as a "unit". This makes it difficult to do things like: include all files from a [Series] if any one of those files meets X criteria.

The Expand modifier can be used to work around most of these limits.