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[DHF]

I need some help or direction getting to the next level of programming with JRiver.

I have had fun with smartlists, and am pretty good at creating them.  But I have never tried to write to a tag using the expression language.

Approximately 15% of my collection has no genre tag.  The good news is that the other 85% has some sort of genre tag. They are a bit messy, but they are there.  The vast majority of missing genres occur with artists that have multiple albums, and their other albums do have a genre tag.

I would like to copy the genre tag from an album by the same Album Artist (auto) to the blank genre tag.

Any ideas how to do this?

[RoderickGI]

Perhaps take a look at using MusicBrainz Picard to fill in the genres, rather than trying to copy across values programmatically. There are other programs that can use Acoustids to identify music and update tags as well. I am just learning to use MusicBrainz Picard to fix a whole lot of music before import into MC. Worth a look. Free.

Otherwise just create a view using the new ~expand function on Album Artist (auto), or simply group an existing view by Album Artist (auto), then manually update the missing genre tags. Might be easier if your collection isn't too huge.

[dtc]

Maybe one of the expression gurus knows better, but I don't think it is easy for an expression to compare something like album artist across multiple albums and set a blank genre accordingly. But, every time I say something like that, somebody knows a way.

Unless you have a very large number of Album Artists, this is pretty easy to do by hand. Here are a couple of suggestions.

Since you are a smart list guru, you can just create a smartlist which contains all your albums, sort it by Album Artist and display Album Artist and Genre. You should be able to quickly scan Genre for blanks, select any of those albums with the same Album Artist and go to the tagging window and set the same genre for the selected albums. Not an expression, but pretty easy unless you have a very large number to do.

Alternatively, you could create a smartlist of just those with blank genres, sorted by album artist and scan through those, select the ones with the same album artist and change the tag manually. Since selecting the tag is a pick list, it is easy to do and you don't have to worry about typing the wrong thing.

If you have a lot of classical albums which have a tag like Composer or Orchestra you could create a smart list of non-empty Composer or Orchestra albums and tag all of those as Classical. You could do this with any tag that might be populated for a particular genre. You could do this before doing either of the first two options.

You can probably do some of these faster than figuring out an expression, unless someone knows a quite way to do this.

[glynor]

The new ~expand modifier could be useful for this, along with Pane Tagging.

Make a new Media View.  Set it to View As: Panes, and add the following categories (in this order):
[Album Artist (Auto)]
[Genre]

Then, click Set Rules for File Display to open up the search editor for the View, and use the Import/Export button to import the following search:

Code: [Select]

[Media Type]=[Audio] [Genre]=[] ~expand="Album Artist (Auto)" ~sort=[Genre],[Artist],[Album],[Disc #],[Track #],[Name]
Save and open the View.

This will filter the view to show only Artists for which at least one of them has a blank Genre.  You can then go through the Artists list in the Album Artist Auto pane, and it'll show (in the Genre pane) the other genres for the selected Artist.  Select Unassigned under Genre, and then select all of the files listed.  Then, you can quickly tag them all by simply checking the box next to the Genre you wish to assign up in the Genre pane.

[RoderickGI]

There you go. I knew that ~expand function would be handy. Even better when someone like Glynor has the time to provide details of its use! 

[DHF]

Glynor:

You rock!  I will try it tonight.  

My collection is very large, perhaps bordering on huge, so manual anything is very time consuming.

Thanks