Print

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

[kiwi]

Is it possible to have multiple artists or genres for a single song?  i.e. the way that images treate "people, places & events" , basically, splitting the value of the tag on ";"s?

There are times when I'd like to classify a song in multiple genres.  Or a song with multiple different artists.  

If this isn't possible now, is it something that could be possible in the future?

I'd love to be able to do things like have:
Classical; Chamber Music
Classical; Orchestra
Rock; Hard
Rock; Soft
Rock; Pop

This would make it quite powerful, maybe it would cause issues with the tags... or cause incompatibilities with other programs, in which case, maybe a custom tag could be used?

kiwi

[Doof]

You could create a custom database field that's ; delimited and then use that for Genre instead. Use the Move\Copy fields utility to copy all of your existing genres over, and then just use your new one from now on.

Same for Artist.

[kiwi]

That's cool.  That'll work for me.

Thanks doof.

Guess I'll have to start playing with the other fields.

Can those fields be embedded in the tags? I like to have them there, so that I can move my files between my laptop and desktop w/o problems.

kiwi

[Doof]

When you create the fields you can specify they get stored inside the file or not.

One way to be sure is to check the Format tab in File Properties after you've created them and editted a couple.

[gkerber]

Yes, I have a separate Genre field, set to delimited so I can set  multiple genre's against any track.  Works perfectly!

And then a view scheme can be set against that new field.  Couldn't be better.

[nila]

Matt - ANY chance we could be aloud to modify the types of the default fields?


It would mean we could change the default year to be a list type, same with artist so we could have them put under both artists if it's got a featuring. ..... in it?

What would be VERY cool is if:   feat.  ft.  featuring.  were all field delimiters for the artist field so that if we had:


Aaliyah feat.  Ja Rule

It would show as Aaliyah and also as Ja Rule - now THAT would be VERY clever
and it'd also make it backwards compatible with pure string values for the fields for compatibility with other programs.

Come on guys - u gotta admit - thats a clever idea

[rocketsauce]

Matt - ANY chance we could be aloud to modify the types of the default fields?

... and it'd also make it backwards compatible with pure string values for the fields for compatibility with other programs.

But wouldn't that break compatability with the tag format standards? I would want my tags to still display correctly in other players and tagging utilities.

Rob

[Doof]

Yeah, it's one thing to have all these fancy data types for custom fields, but as soon as you start talking about the standard tags, it's a completely different story.

[kiwi]

Are semi-colons invalid in regular tags?  If they aren't then it shouldn't break compatibility.  Other programs would just list the tag as:
Classical; Chamber Music

kiwi

[nila]

yeah, that was what I was thinking.

Even though we see it and interpret it as 'list types' it is in fact, in the tag, just a string with semi-colons in it.

So other users would see:

Aaliyah; Ja Rule; Ashanti

and we see it as a 'list' type. Defining it as a list type just means that MC instead of showing it to us as a string with semi-colons in it, breaks up the string to multiple values.

Or at least thats how I always figured it worked.

If it does it should be fully backwards compatible no matter what.

And my feat. as a seperator idea would also work just as well

[kiwi]

Does anyone know how to populate one field from another?  I'd rather not have to retype all of my genre's back in.

I played with this a bit and it is quite handy.  If you create a view that has two columns that are both this new genre field, then you can create ANDs within the data.

Btw, I assume that there is no way to convert the old genre tag to a list type field?

kiwi

[kiwi]

gmonkey - That's not a bad idea, use the second fields as "sub-genre"/"sub-artist"  

I'll play around with it and see whether it works/whether I like the way it works.  

Or, I guess that I might be able to create a calculated field that was the combination of the original genre field plus the second list field.

I have all my music files as APEs and MP3s.  I was thinking that the best option might be to just correct them all as APEs and then re-transcode to MP3s, does this make sense or is there an easier way to do this?

Thanks,
kiwi

[salsbst1]

gmonkey - That's not a bad idea, use the second fields as "sub-genre"/"sub-artist"  

Can't speak for gmonkey but I wouldn't recommend using the list fields as "sub-" values, but rather duplicate the "primary" value in the list field.

Like this:

Genre: Fusion
Genres: Fusion;Rock;Funk

Otherwise, you won't get what you're probably looking for out of the view schemes.... at least you won't get what I'm looking for out of the view schemes

[loraan]

You could create a custom database field that's ; delimited and then use that for Genre instead. Use the Move\Copy fields utility to copy all of your existing genres over, and then just use your new one from now on.

Incidentally, that's what I do. I use Genre as it's intended, but I break Genres out into "regular music" (no genre) and "genre music". "Regular music" is anything that you might hear on the radio. Examples of "genre music" include: Brazilian, Funk, Trance/Dance/Techno. Basically, regular "songs" go in "no genre/regular music" and everything else gets a genre.

Then, I use Custom 1 for a sort of pseudo-genre descriptor. I put descriptive strings in, separated by spaces. So a single file might have Custom 1 = "Soft 1990s Jukebox". I then create smartlists with the rule:

[custom 1]="1990s"
[custom 1]="Soft"

etc....

I find it easier to add/remove songs from these pseudo-genre smart-lists by tagging the files than by manually adding/removing the files to/from a playlist.

Examples of my pseudo-genre tags include:

Soft
Hard
Dark
Women
1970s
1980s
1990s
2000s

You might wonder why I don't just use "year" for my "decade" lists. Those lists are intended to represent songs that were on the radio during those decades, not necessarily all songs that I have from those decades.