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[Jay Freeman]

What is the best way of tagging / displaying Live albums, Studio albums, singles or EP's?

I used to put (EP) or (Live) in the album title, but this looked pretty messy, I could put the type in the description tag but I'm wondering if there is a tried and tested method most people use.

thanks

[blgentry]

You can put that extra information in another field and track it that way.  I use a custom field called "Album Info" to hold that kind of thing.

It all depends on how you are going to use it.  If you want to be able to sort on this information, you might want to make it a List type field and then use regular values, so that every live album has a value of "Live" or "(Live)".  The key point is to make them the same so that they search and sort properly.

If you think you might have albums that have *identical* names, but a different note of live or EP or something else, you need to consider this.  It's going to get messy if you have duplicate album names for different versions of the same album.  If all of your album names are unique, then you can ignore this part.

The real question is, how do you want to use this information?  Just displayed next to the album name (or under it)?  Search on it?  Sort on it?  Something else?

My gut feeling is that a custom list type field would be great for your use, but I'm not sure.

Brian.

[Jay Freeman]

I'm pretty sure (95%) that the album names are unique, I'll have a look at implementing what you said.

Thanks

J

[Jay Freeman]

It all depends on how you are going to use it.  If you want to be able to sort on this information, you might want to make it a List type field and then use regular values, so that every live album has a value of "Live" or "(Live)".  The key point is to make them the same so that they search and sort properly.

Brian.

That worked a treat for me, now I have to spend the next lifetime tagging everything. The only downside is that it won't be stored in the file tag (ID3)

[ferday]

It is stored in the file

The custom fields are written in vorbis comment and are usually read as TXXX tags in id3.  They would have to be mapped in another program but they are there and they follow the file

[Jay Freeman]

That's really good to know thanks, I have a backup of my media I take to the office so I can listen while I work.

If anyone else follows this thread and wants to do the same, I used https://wiki.jriver.com/index.php/Library_Fields as a reference and created a custom field called "Type" which is a semi-colon delimited list of:

Studio;Remaster;Limited Edition;Deluxe;Best of;Live;Single;EP;Bootleg

Thanks for your help Brian

[blgentry]

That worked a treat for me, now I have to spend the next lifetime tagging everything.

Glad to know this is working for you. 

As for tagging your files, you should be able to do searches against the album name (or whereever you have that info now) to isolate groups of albums.  If you have the files from 10 "live" albums, you can tag them all at once.  Just open the tagging window (edit > tag) and change the value of your new custom field (Type) to be whatever you want it to be.

Good luck!

Brian.

[Matt]

Just a little note that the "Album Type" field will correctly identify singles in the first builds of MC22.

[Vocalpoint]

What is the best way of tagging / displaying Live albums, Studio albums, singles or EP's?

I used to put (EP) or (Live) in the album title, but this looked pretty messy, I could put the type in the description tag but I'm wondering if there is a tried and tested method most people use.

thanks

I added a custom field to our master library called Release Type. Handles every possible media source/container/deliverable I could think of.

I have over 100000+ audio items in the library right now and nary a one is missing a "release type".

VP

[Jay Freeman]

I finally tagged every audio file I have (mp3 and flac) which took me a few days here and there of mass tagging. I gave the custom tag a name of 'Live' and the user Data type as 'List (Semicolon delimited)' with Acceptable Values of 'Studio;Single;Live;Bootleg'.

I had to do a fresh install of Media Centre (OS died), and after importing about half of my files have a recognized custom tag showing up. I checked with ffprobe and the custom tag is there for the files that fail to show the custom tag.

Have I done something wrong when setting up the fresh install?

[Jay Freeman]

Ok it seems that if I define the custom Tag *before* importing anything then the metadata is read correctly.

[blgentry]

^ Looks like you got it figured out. 

The other way to do it, after the fact, is to make MC update the library from the files.  So, you import and tags are missing.  Then you add the custom field to the library.  Finally, you highlight all files and select Library Tools > Update Library (from tags) .

That forces MC to re-read the tags in all files and apply them to the library as appropriate.

Brian.

[Jay Freeman]

Thanks, good to know for the future in case I do this again