Print

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

[8139david]

Suppose there is a singer you like. You may want to store some information about her: date of birth, etc.
If you want to store that with MC, you have to store that for any song you have of her.
It's doable, but it would be simpler to fill the information once and for all, just about the Artist and her Date of birth.
The information would then be automatically retrieved whenever asked for.
Why can't MC's library implement a feature like that?

[blgentry]

Media Center *does* do this!

It's called relational fields.  I just did an experiment to make sure it works the way I think it does.  When you define a new field in the Library, you can choose to make it Relational for Artist, or Album, or Series.

Then, when you fill in that value, it applies to ALL files with the same Artist. Note that the Relational setting can be set to Artist.  Or to Album.  Or to Series.  It does not apply to all at the same time.  Just one of those choices.  Which is probably what you want actually. 

Brian.

[8139david]

Ah thanks! I had missed that
A simple trial confirms I can create a DateOfBirth field relational to Artist.

My next question is obvious:
Why doesn't MC's library allow this for any pair of fields, or at least, more pairs of fields?
Currently, it only works for pairs of fields one member of which is Artist, Album, or Series (eg <DateOfBirth, Artist>).

[glynor]

This is a relatively new feature (implemented in MC20 or maybe late in MC19), and as is their custom, they implement new features with limited scope and improve them over time.

Why it wasn't done so that you can pick any arbitrary relational "key field"?  I dunno. There may be an architectural limit in how the database works? I'm guessing here, but...

Perhaps the issue is that Fields in MC can be very complex beasts that are calculated and can reference other fields, which do their own expressions and reference playlists. Doing this and then iterating across all of the files in the Library (which may be 8 million rows) could cause all sorts of untold performance problems. Not sure. But, in any case, it is currently limited to just those three possibilities.

I would also like to see this extended to arbitrary fields, including user-created ones. If it has to be limited such that it can only be a "standard" (and not calculated) field, so be it. But I don't know if this is possible.