What happened to Stacks in the Windows 7 Explorer? | The Coffeehouse

alwaysmc2
It's not stupid; It's advanced!

Right now I'm using the Windows 7 RC, and I can't find the "stack by" feature that was in Vista and (I thought) the beta version of Windows 7. Does anyone know about this?

PaoloM
Hypermediocrity

They are gone.

W3bbo
The Master of Baiters

In reply to PaoloM

#Aug 6th @ 7:51 AM

Good riddance too, t'was a gimmick providing no real usability advantage.

alwaysmc2
It's not stupid; It's advanced!

In reply to W3bbo

#Aug 6th @ 8:28 AM

bah, I wanted to count how many different artists I had in my library the other day, so i was going to go to my music library and stack by artist. Now there's just a special view for Music-type folders to view by album. I liked the flexibility of stacks... I could also go to any random folder of pictures and stack by month. Sad There's new features in Explorer which have similiar usefullness, but it's not the same.

stevo_
Human after all

Uh you can 'Arrange by', 'Artist' on the music folder.. top right

alwaysmc2
It's not stupid; It's advanced!

In reply to stevo_

#Aug 6th @ 9:03 AM

That's the next best thing, but I liked how with Stacks I it would take all of the icons for one artist (in this example) and merge them into a single icon (stack). Then I could double-click on that and see only that artist. It's somewhat like a search query builder in that way.

stevo_
Human after all

In reply to alwaysmc2

#Aug 6th @ 9:06 AM

Thats exactly what arrange by does, it even makes the stack icon out of a selection of the albums for that artist, vs generic blue tiles.

Best example I could find online was this one stacking by genre:

http://www.cdrinfo.com/Sections/Articles/Sources/M/Microsoft%20Windows%207/images/MusicGenre.jpg

Harlequin
http://twitter.com/TrueHarlequin

In reply to alwaysmc2

#Aug 6th @ 8:59 AM

Holy crap....you just have all your music in one flat folder?

You need to organize:

/ArtistName/Album/*.mp3

PaoloM
Hypermediocrity

In reply to Harlequin

#Aug 6th @ 9:15 AM

That's not really necessary anymore with Windows 7 Smiley

alwaysmc2
It's not stupid; It's advanced!

In reply to stevo_

#Aug 6th @ 9:11 AM

ah, right. That's what I ended up using. My only complaint about that is that it's not a general tool.. You can't "arrange by" any given column from "details view."

alwaysmc2
It's not stupid; It's advanced!

In reply to PaoloM

#Aug 6th @ 9:23 AM

nah, but I've taken to sorting my music further into folders such as "Zune," "Zune DRM Free," "Ripped from CD," "URGE Stripped DRM," "Free Music," and "'Free' Music." so it's /source/artist/album.

Anyway, none of this is a big deal. It's too bad that a feature is gone, though... it never got in the way when you didn't want to use it, so why take it out?

Heywood_J
Trust me, I'm from the Internets

In reply to W3bbo

#Aug 6th @ 8:28 AM

Good riddance too, t'was a gimmick providing no real usability advantage.

Speaking of useless gimmicks. I was going to press Alt-Tab to switch windows but accidently pressed the "Windows" key instead of Alt. If you are running Vista or Win7 try it.

I really wish Microsoft's programmers would find better things to do with their time.

Harlequin
http://twitter.com/TrueHarlequin

In reply to PaoloM

#Aug 6th @ 9:23 AM

Well I'm sure the Windows Media Player (12?) that comes with Windows 7 is the best way to view your music. But to have all your files in one flat folder sounds really unusable to me unless you have 50 songs and not tens of thousands. Imagine building a website like that. 5000 files, .aspx pages, images, master files, .js files, in one flat directory...nightmare.

PaoloM
Hypermediocrity

In reply to Harlequin

#Aug 6th @ 11:23 AM

No need for WMP. In explorer, all the cool views in the libraries are backed by the index, so you can just Arrange by genre, album, artist, etc, with no need to further organization. Of course, you can do that, if you want, but now you don't really need it anymore.

contextfree

In reply to alwaysmc2

#Aug 6th @ 9:28 AM

you can simply use the chevron dropdown for each column in details view to show those items in a given range for that column (they even have little stack icons) which is about as fast/convenient as double-clicking on a stack, right?

alwaysmc2
It's not stupid; It's advanced!

In reply to contextfree

#Aug 6th @ 12:10 PM

Yeah, that's the functionality I want most of the time.

...and I don't have all my music in a flat folder. Perplexed Though, if I relied totally on Windows Media Player then it wouldn't really matter, now would it?

ZippyV
Fired Up

Apparantly, the new guest mode is also ripped out of the final version. Why did they do that?

oCpmture

How can anyone say stack by isn't a useful featuer? The library "Arrange By" in windows 7 RC has a very limited preset of categories to "Stack by". What If i want to stack pictures by their dimensions? , What if I want to stack music by composer, which is not one of the presets? Arrange by is an extremely dumbed down version of stack by. Before they removed the stack by feature you can basically stack by any attribute available to a file, camera model, bitrate, length, etc whatever.