QUOTE(Squeller @ Apr 18 2005, 10:21 AM)
Hi,
at the moment in my columns ui playlist view I format the first track of an album different. But simply by detecting, if the id3 track number is "1"
$if($strcmp($num(%tracknumber%,2),'01')
But to detect more acurately, if its part of an album, I need to have a look into the album tags of the following tracks. Is that possible?
No!
QUOTE(Squeller @ Apr 18 2005, 10:21 AM)
There are lots of playlists which show album information on the left side, I'm sure they do also look into id3 infos of the next playlist entries.
Then you're wrong!

It's one track at a time with no knowledge of the surrounding tracks.
Btw: This has been answered several times, so you should be able to find old posts discussing it.
The best you can do is use the tracknumbers, and at the same time assume that every track in an album has the same tags present. By assuming the latter, you can make the album info dynamic, meaning that you won't get empty lines in the album info.
Example: Say you want to show %date% on line 3 (%tracknumber% = 3) and %genre% on 4. A dynamic solution would move %genre% up from 4 to 3 if %date% is missing.
To achieve this, I would recommend you have a look at picmixer's formatting (maybe it's foosion that deserves the credit, as he has optimized parts of that formatting. I don't know.)