Discovery paths — each node's drill-down route

A discovery path is the route a browser walks inside a node. The same node can be presented as Album Artist → Album → Tracks, or as a single flat track list, or grouped by Genre and then Artist, or by Year. A path is built from one or more levels (the field each level groups by) ending in a leaf (what the deepest level shows — albums then their tracks, or a flat track list). A node can even carry several paths at once, so it offers more than one way in.

Different content wants different shapes, and the wrong shape makes a node unusable. Music wants album-artist grouping; a playlist wants a flat ordered list; podcasts want their subscriptions. Each node gets the right answer because each holds its own path.

Worked example. You have a 5,000-track Jazz filter and a 30-track "Friday Night" playlist, both exposed.

• For the Jazz filter you apply a template whose path is Album Artist → Album → Tracks. On the device you drill: artists, then that artist's albums, then the album's tracks in disc-and-track order.
• For the playlist you apply the Flat Tracks template instead. Opening it gives the 30 tracks in playlist order, with no artist or album layer in between — exactly what a playlist should be.

Same plugin, same dialog, two nodes, two completely different shapes — because the path is a property of the node, not a global setting. You can't predict a node's on-device layout without knowing which template it carries; that's why this needs spelling out.

A node doesn't just receive a copy of a template — it follows it. The View tree shows which template each node follows, right after the node's name, and editing a template on the Paths tab immediately reshapes every node following it — no re-applying node by node. Applying a template to a hidden node also makes it visible again: applying is the "show me this, shaped like that" gesture, while hiding stays with the Visible checkbox. Each template row shows a live (n) count of the nodes following it, and a template can only be deleted while that count is zero — the delete button stays disabled while anything follows the template, so a node can never be left orphaned by a delete. To see exactly which nodes follow a template, the funnel button beside the View tree filters the tree down to just those nodes; selecting another template re-filters, and toggling the funnel off restores the full tree. Deleting an unused template also sticks now — the shipped defaults are no longer quietly re-created the next time the plugin loads.

When a path ends in the Album → Tracks leaf, you also decide what counts as one album. Instead of grouping strictly by album title, you pick one or more fields — Album, Sort Album, Year, Album Artist — that together decide which tracks fuse into a single album, how its heading reads, and the order the albums appear, each field sortable ascending or descending. Adding Album Artist keeps two same-named albums by different artists apart; adding Year descending lists an artist's albums newest-first. When you group by year, MusicBee offers two fields that mirror its own — Year, the full date tag (which can hold a whole date like 2024-03-15), and Year (yyyy), just the four-digit year — so picking Year (yyyy) gathers every release of a year together instead of splitting it by exact date.

The defaults are sensible — new filters are shaped by album artist, playlists and the Inbox get sensible defaults — so for the common case you change nothing. Reach for the View tab when you want a particular node shaped differently.

Settings

You build named, reusable path templates on the Paths tab, then apply them to nodes on the View tab.

Control	What it does
Apply	Makes every node you've ticked in the tree follow the currently selected template (and re-exposes it if it was hidden).
Expand All / Collapse All	Expand or collapse the whole endpoint tree.
Show only the nodes following the selected template	The funnel toggle: filters the endpoint tree to only the nodes following the selected template. Select another template to re-filter; toggle off to restore the full tree.
Template	The named path template being edited.
↑ / ↓	Move the selected template up or down in the list, to order how your templates are presented.
Group by	The field(s) the level groups by (e.g. Album Artist).
Leaf	What the deepest level shows.
Album → Tracks (AT)	Leaf mode: Album → Tracks — drill through albums to their tracks.
Flat Tracks (T)	Leaf mode: Flat Tracks — a single flat track list.
Include [All Tracks] at each level	Adds an [All Tracks] shortcut at each level. Shown only in Album → Tracks mode.
Group album by	Defines what counts as one album, how its title reads, and the order albums appear — pick one or more fields (Album, Sort Album, Year, Album Artist…), each with its own ascending/descending toggle. Shown only in Album → Tracks mode.
Add / Remove	Add or remove a path in the template.