Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[samwisesam]

hi, I wonder if anyone can help me. Currently I have hundreds of Elvis albums listed under just Elvis Presley as the Artist. I wanted to have sub categories so in Windows Explorer I created folders such as Elvis Presley Live, Movies, FTD etc. I then re-imported to JRiver thinking this would re-arrange my artist structure. Unfortunately, all it did was to re-import all the songs under the existing artist/album structure so I ended up with thousands of duplicates. Is there a way of setting this up without changing all the artist names in the meta data to Elvis Live etc.?

thanks  

[CountryBumkin]

Try the Rename, Move & Copy Files tool. https://wiki.jriver.com/index.php/Rename,_Move,_%26_Copy_Files

[Arindelle]

@Country bumpkin -- sorry was almost finished so I'll post my longwinded reply any way. But he's right O.P,  that's what you want to do

I'd suggest you use tags to do this. Depending on what you already use, and how much detail you need in your tags, Styles or Keywords would be good fields to do this with.

As you have already restructured your directories, this would be really quite easy to do. Go to a file view and choose the location of Elvis Live, Film Scores etc. You don't even have to use these just for Elvis. Do NOT change the Artist and/or Album Artist Tags. Select all the tracks under your Live directory and just type in the Keyword (or styles field) once. All done do this for your remaining music "types" and you are finished.

Now in the the Views you like to use in playback, modify a view to incorporate this field (in the category box) and bingo your done. Just filter the Elvis stuff by your Keywords (or Styles or Grouping whatever you chose).  Afterwards you can continue to use these tags for other artist (or not), if they apply.

Note: without going into all my reasoning, I suggest you revert to your Original File structure (Album artist/Album). Ideally you want to be consistent for all Artist in your collection, you want the paths to be as short as possible, and you want to have the ability to rebuild your library based on the directory structure resembles key tag fields. Indicating genres or types has no benefit as these are in the database (and normally are also embedded in the files themselves. You can benefit from it temporarily to make quick work of retagging, but you could regret having you directories setup in a sort of nonstandard way.  The only reason to do so might be if you playback just from Windows, but then why have a good player/front-end like JRiver?

To revert you can use the Rename, Move Copy tool; to remove your fake duplicates you can reconfigure your import options (to include Update for external Changes and "Fix Broken Links set to Yes protect missing drives" and rerun autoimport manually.

Please read the Wiki on this for more info https://wiki.jriver.com/index.php/Getting_Started https://wiki.jriver.com/index.php/Category:Frequently_Asked_Questions

[blgentry]

We should break up your question into two parts:

1.  How do I get rid of all of these duplicates?  Ariendelle has covered one method.  Another is to do a search for missing files, and just delete them all manually.  You can paste this into the search box, or make a smartlist with it:

Code: [Select]

[=ismissing()]=1
That will find all of the files that MC can no longer locate on your system.

You should also decide if you want to keep your new folder structure, or revert to the old one.  It's a judgement call; I think either one is fine as long as it makes sense to you and you can use it going forward.

Next question in the next post.

Brian.

[blgentry]

2.  How do I add a category to my Artists view to show me different categories of Albums that I define?

If you're using the normal Artists view, that shows album thumbnails, there are several ways to do this.  I'll outline one way that can work.

A.  Copy your artists view to a new view by dragging it to the top where it says "Audio" and choosing "Copy".  Now you'll have "Artists (1)" that you can edit, rename, and experiment with.
B.  Let's create a new library field to hold your new Album Category information.
1.  Tools > Options > Library & Folders > Manage Library fields
2.  Add new field.  Fill out a name that makes sense.  I used "Album Category".  Make it Data type:  String and Edit Type:  List .
3.  Click Ok until you get out of all of that.

C.  Edit your new view (Artists (1)).  Right click, then select customize view.
D.  In the "show categories in this order" box at the left, remove everything except Album Artist (auto).
E.  Add a new category by pressing Add.
F.   In the dialog that pops up, select Expression.  Then cut and paste this expression into the big field that says "expression to group by":

Code: [Select]

FirstNotEmpty([Album Category],[Album])
G.  Click OK on everything until you're back to the main MC screen.

Now this view should show you Artists as the top level and when you drill into a particular artist, it will show you either the Album Category, OR the Albums as the next level.

You need to tell MC what Album Category you want to use for some of your Elvis albums.  Select an album (or several albums).  Then open the tagging window with Edit > Tag .  In the new tagging window click the gear icon and select to show all fields.  Now go find the [Album Category] field.  Type in what you want to use for Category.  For example:  Live, or Studio, or Bootleg .  Click anywhere to save that change, then close the tagging window.

Now your new view should show your new Album Category under Elvis.  You can repeat this process to tag all of your Elvis albums.  You can now apply this same logic to other albums by other artists, and you'll get categories there too.

Typing this up it seems like a LOT of steps.  But it's really not too bad.  I did a proof of concept on this in about 3 minutes.

Good luck!

Brian.

[samwisesam]

Thanks for all the information. I've got rid of the duplicates so that's good news.

Brian,  cheers for taking the time to type all that out. It does seem complex but if it took you three minutes then perhaps not as bad as it seems. I wont have time tonight but will endeavour to try that process tomorrow. I've put my Windows file structure back to normal to avoid any complications. 

Again thanks to all for offering advice and helping me out

Cheers