Topic: Calculated Fields -- What Would You Like? (Read 6979 times)

Matt · « **on:** May 28, 2003, 02:58:27 pm »

The next build of Media Center will have a new calculated database field system. It will allow calculated fields (auto album artist, filename path, filename name, complete album, etc.) to be shown in lists as a column.

These fields will be editable when possible, be available in for use in view schemes, and support drag-n-drop where logical.

Here's what we have so far:

volume name
album artist (auto)
complete album
album type
removable
date (day)
date (month)
date (year)
filename (name)
filename (path)

We're wondering what other fields you would like? (it won't be a user-specified template based system for 9.0)

We could add things like this:
artist - album
album (year)
is file dirty (tag needs to be saved)
etc.

Thanks for any advice!

KingSparta · « **Reply #1 on:** May 28, 2003, 03:10:48 pm »

>> The next build of Media Center will have a new
>> calculated database field system.
ok, I will ask

now what is a calculated database field system (Calculated Fields)

NoCodeUK · « **Reply #2 on:** May 28, 2003, 03:21:56 pm »

Year Album or (Year) Album please so that view schemes can have albums sorted chronologically

Artist - Year - Album possibly for an all inclusive one field view scheme

And for when it is definable in 9.1/10.0 Series number Episode Number Name for TV series (unfortunately these are my custom fields so will not be available until custom templates are available)

This is very exciting guys!! This is my one thing at the moment which stops MC from sorting my media perfectly and now it is going to be resolved

Would it be possible to use a calculated field but display something different eg use calculated field Year Album to chronologically sort albums in the tree but display simply as Album??

Keep it up! Gotta Love MC

Adam

Matt · « **Reply #3 on:** May 28, 2003, 03:23:04 pm »

Quote

ok, I will ask

now what is a calculated database field system

Yeah, good point. Calculated fields are fileds that aren't stored in the tag / database, but instead calculated from stuff that is in the database.

A simple example is "Date (month)." Date is stored in the database. "Date (month)" analyzes that date and spits out "January", "February", etc.

Hopefully that makes sense.

Quote

filename (name)
filename (path)

I don't remember the name, but someone has been requesting this since version 7. Hopefully they'll find this

Chris Shaw · « **Reply #4 on:** May 28, 2003, 03:26:24 pm »

ARTIST - ALBUM
TRACK # - NAME

are the two most useful I can think of. Thanks for listening.

JimH · « **Reply #5 on:** May 28, 2003, 04:07:26 pm »

Quote

>> The next build of Media Center will have a new
ok, I will ask

now what is a calculated database field system

I'm glad you had the nerve to ask.

KingSparta · « **Reply #6 on:** May 28, 2003, 04:11:11 pm »

do you remember that scifi movie, i think it was 2001 where the guy was floating in space in his space sute forever lost.

thats me

no really close your eyes, i can see my face.

JimH · « **Reply #7 on:** May 28, 2003, 04:13:36 pm »

No, but I remember The Fly, where a guy got in a transporter with a fly and ended up somewhere else as the fly. I still have nightmares.

KingSparta · « **Reply #8 on:** May 28, 2003, 04:22:02 pm »

Quote

No, but I remember The Fly, where a guy got in a transporter with a fly and ended up somewhere else as the fly. I still have nightmares.

I still think the orginal "The Fly" was better.

he kind of got lost also

AZ_JazzyJ · « **Reply #9 on:** May 28, 2003, 04:22:58 pm »

On the date fields, would those be creation date, modified date, or import date (or D. All of the Above)? I can see where it would be cool to create a view of all music (or graphics) imported in a specific month or in a given year.

I would also love to see Artist - Year - Album - Track # so I could chronologically listen to an artist's albums in the order they appeared on the CD.

Would this functionality also allow you to find all tracks that have Image Files stored inside the file rather than point to a CD Art directory? (Still a little fuzzy on which fields are stored versus calculated).

Jeff

loraan · « **Reply #10 on:** May 28, 2003, 08:55:06 pm »

Quote

I would also love to see Artist - Year - Album - Track # so I could chronologically listen to an artist's albums in the order they appeared on the CD.

So, am I stupid or something? Why is this preferable to having the information in four separate columns and then sorting and sub-sorting on each of the columns?

Cmagic · « **Reply #11 on:** May 28, 2003, 11:23:36 pm »

Thanks Matt,

This feature seems nice. I think it will be be especially useful to sort pictures in chronological order. It will probably take a build or two for people to experiment with calculated fields before you get some smart feeback on what to put in there.

One thing I'm wondering: are you going to add a new category (calculated fields) or will they be splitted across General, Extended, FIle Info, Audio categories ?
Might also be nice to "re-work" those categories (may be user editable) but at least to reflect the various media formats (e.g General, Audio, Images, Video, Data, File Info.)

Anyway thanks for this new toy !

Christian

NoCodeUK · « **Reply #12 on:** May 28, 2003, 11:59:16 pm »

Ioraan,

Currently you cannot sort in the tree. Using calculated fields in view schemes will allow this.

Adam

V-Man · « **Reply #13 on:** May 29, 2003, 12:37:38 am »

Quote

So, am I stupid or something? Why is this preferable to having the information in four separate columns and then sorting and sub-sorting on each of the columns?

Because you can't have multiple columns in the tree view.

Matt, fantastic. Get a wriggle-on, I can't wait for this feature!

nila · « **Reply #14 on:** May 29, 2003, 04:04:01 am »

Wahoo!!!

This one should be great!

Cant wait till we can create them ourselves but for now this is a gorgeous step forwards - especially in hairstyle mode it'll help alot.

track # - Name : will allow the tree to sort them by track number but display the name
year - album - genre
year - album
all good for giving an extra bit of info with the album mode

year imported
month imported
day imported
both great for sorting by that to keep track of new albums and when u got them etc.

Has image file
album matching bitrate

I'm sure there are loads more that would be useful but like it was said, playing will be the only way to find out.

Could we have a boolean field that we could set to NOT remove files if it was set when we do update library? This one would help me a LOT with my films which I keep offline but would want MC to manage. - or is that what u mean by removeable? in which case THANKS!!

Filename and path are both also hugely welcomed!!

nila · « **Reply #15 on:** May 29, 2003, 04:07:12 am »

number of tracks in album would be nice:

year - album - number of tracks in album - album genre

also - album rating - the average rating for the album
maybe do it as an option where we can choose to use mean or mode average

Oh yeah - and making all fields editable is definitely nice.

Sometimes I'd like to be able to edit the number of plays for a track for instance without just having to reset it (I sometimes leave a track looping and dont want the count going to 100).

loraan · « **Reply #16 on:** May 29, 2003, 07:05:35 am »

Quote

Because you can't have multiple columns in the tree view.

Ohhh--I see.

Thanks for the clarification.

zevele10 · « **Reply #17 on:** May 29, 2003, 07:45:32 am »

Year Album or (Year) Album please so that view schemes can have albums sorted chronologically

-=-=-=-=

I vote A MILLION TIMES for this one

Can you make a Artist Album Year

=== to view all albums of one artist in chronological order

lee269 · « **Reply #18 on:** May 29, 2003, 09:29:36 am »

Along with all the other dates, can we have date last played (year/month/day)?

Basically, bring them all on, provided they can all be implemented without confusing the interface.

Tolga · « **Reply #19 on:** May 29, 2003, 09:52:35 am »

How about
Name (Artist)
Track # - Name (Artist)

These could be useful for mixed albums.
It would be double cool, if (Artist) is added only if it exists for a file and if all selection does not have a common artist.

Some people suggested things like:

album - genre

I expect that genre would mean here, "album genre", if the files don't have a common genre, the output should be empty string, that is album - genre is reduced to album.

NoCodeUK · « **Reply #20 on:** May 29, 2003, 10:00:01 am »

Zev Artist ALbum Year would still sort alphabetically by Album. Year is going to have to come before Album to sort chronologically

Adam

Marko · « **Reply #21 on:** May 30, 2003, 04:05:38 am »

Been out of circulation for a bit......

Are these in yet?
If they are, can someone nudge me in the right direction coz I can't find 'em.

Cheers:)

Listening to: 'Rambling, Gambling Willie' from 'The Bootleg Series (Vol 1-3)' by 'Bob Dylan' on Media Center 9.0

Cmagic · « **Reply #22 on:** May 30, 2003, 05:50:37 am »

Hi Marko, welcome back,

Calculated fields are not in yet (179). We're all awaiting this new feature in the coming builds.
Today's quite hot in Paris, think I'll soon get out of the lab and grab a really cold beer

Have a nice day,

C.

zevele10 · « **Reply #23 on:** May 30, 2003, 09:11:36 am »

Zev Artist ALbum Year would still sort alphabetically by Album. Year is going to have to come before Album to sort chronologically

-=-=-=-=
In this case Artist Year Album will do?

-=-=-=-=-

This are the 2 things i HATE about computer
Albums in a-b-c-d order.
And the same when you burn a mp3cd

NoCodeUK · « **Reply #24 on:** May 30, 2003, 09:30:24 am »

Presumably we would be able to use the calculated fields when burning CDs too

Adam

gvag · « **Reply #25 on:** May 30, 2003, 11:01:44 pm »

How about Date Imported(Date) if you're exporting your data (as I do) then the data's out of date.

Phydeaux · « **Reply #26 on:** June 01, 2003, 02:10:48 am »

An if(what, true, false) function would be nice

P.

Ingo · « **Reply #27 on:** June 17, 2003, 01:25:49 am »

I've been looking around on how to use this....

is there anything available like
Track# - Name
Or even user configurabel field concatenation?
And user configurable field splitting? (would be usefull to split the path field in subfields and build a hirarchy.....)

Ingo

NoCodeUK · « **Reply #28 on:** June 17, 2003, 02:08:17 am »

Matt,

Are some of these calvulated fields that people were suggesting going to be implemented once the GUI changes have been done? If possible I would still like some way to sort Albums chronologically rather than Alphabetically. Is there any way this could be implemenetd in the new view scheme logic eg when you set up a column you can also set up its sort criteria so I could set up the album column to sort by Artist then year so it would have all my albums listed alphabetically y artist but chronologically within the artist. I just find this a much more satisfactory way to sort music than alphabetically.

Adam

Sam · « **Reply #29 on:** June 17, 2003, 05:21:03 am »

I'd like to be able to see # of songs for each artist and for each album.

I don't know whether this would be a calculated field, or maybe a "column" in the tree.

NoCodeUK · « **Reply #30 on:** June 17, 2003, 06:08:58 am »

It would be kinda cool if these could be calculated and then shown next to the relevant info in the columns dependant on the view scheme with every column referring to the column to its right so in an artist/album/name scheme this would show something like The Beatles (9)/Abbey Road (12)/Something
meaning the beatles have 9 albums, one of which is Abbey Road which contains 12 tracks. To claculate this on the fly might cause a lot of slowdown not sure. If so could it be stored in the database during audio analysis or something like that. Would be a very nice feature but hey im not a programmer so I dont even know if its possible (although I did hear somebody say once that nothing is impossible to program on a computer, its just that some things are harder than others

)

Adam

Soundman · « **Reply #31 on:** June 17, 2003, 06:13:48 am »

Are you still taking suggestions for this?

What I really want are these:

ARTIST - ALBUM (This one is most important!)
PLAYLIST - ARTIST
PLAYLIST - ARTIST - ALBUM
LOCATION - ARTIST
LOCATION - ARTIST - ALBUM

Why? Because I tend to organize things mostly by playlist and location, rather than albums, and when I do use albums, I want ARTIST-ALBUM to appear as one field rather than two.

For video:
PROGRAM NAME - EPISODE NAME
GENRE - PROGRAM NAME - EPISODE NAME

Thanks,
Soundman

NoCodeUK · « **Reply #32 on:** June 17, 2003, 06:15:37 am »

Most important one for me is Year - Album but I think you already knew that

Oh and by the way Kurt wants an ipod sync command. I'm not sure if he mentioned it

Adam

NoCodeUK · « **Reply #33 on:** June 17, 2003, 06:19:27 am »

Quote

Might also be nice to "re-work" those categories (may be user editable) but at least to reflect the various media formats (e.g General, Audio, Images, Video, Data, File Info.)

Just noticed this from Christian. This would be very good now that groups have gone. This way, when clicking on an Audio file you only get access to general and audio properties, video you only get General and Video etc. If it can apply to all files it goes oin general other wise it goes in the specific category. Only problem is if something applies to more than one category but not all as you wouldn't want to have two sets of height and width fields just so they could go under images and video but hey I am sure you guys could work something out

Adam

knickelfarz · « **Reply #34 on:** June 17, 2003, 07:00:58 am »

Quote

...We could add things like this:

is file dirty (tag needs to be saved)

This seems to be very important for me ... after doing some changes in properties you may forget to update the tags of the files by using the "Library Tools". So your files and library may get inconsistent ... a calculated field to keep control would be nice.

Quote

I'd like to be able to see # of songs for each artist and for each album.

Quote

...this would show something like The Beatles (9)/Abbey Road (12)/Something meaning the beatles have 9 albums, one of which is Abbey Road which contains 12 tracks.

I'm even not sure if this will slow down the database ... but if it would be possible, it could be used to create something more ... maybe a list style with "Media Links" - please take a look here

Matt · « **Reply #35 on:** June 17, 2003, 07:49:23 am »

Next build will let you create template based database fields, so you'll be able to make anything you like. (i.e. "[Artist] - [Album] ([Year])" etc.)

Quote

This seems to be very important for me ... after doing some changes in properties you may forget to update the tags of the files by using the "Library Tools". So your files and library may get inconsistent ... a calculated field to keep control would be nice.

Just don't worry -- MC will stay synchronized.

NoCodeUK · « **Reply #36 on:** June 17, 2003, 08:06:51 am »

Fantastic!! That is really great news. MC will now be totally complete in my eyes!!

Nice one. Any possibility of the numbering thing mentioned above??

Cheers

Adam

Ingo · « **Reply #37 on:** June 17, 2003, 08:41:26 am »

Fantastic!! That is really great news. (c) by NoCodeUK ;-)

Thanks Matt. Now I'm really looking forward for tonight.

Ingo

loraan · « **Reply #38 on:** June 17, 2003, 10:34:29 am »

Quote

Is there any way this could be implemenetd in the new view scheme logic eg when you set up a column you can also set up its sort criteria so I could set up the album column to sort by Artist then year so it would have all my albums listed alphabetically y artist but chronologically within the artist. I just find this a much more satisfactory way to sort music than alphabetically.

Seconded. I'd really like this option. Sort artists alphabetically, but sort albums per artist chronologically.

nila · « **Reply #39 on:** June 18, 2003, 01:05:56 am »

This is GREAT

Love the way I can also include complete album into my things so each album says if it's complete.

Any possibility of giving us an option to do:

numberOfTracks (the number of tracks in that album)
totalLength (duration of the group of songs - album)
albumBitrate (would say 'varies' if it varies)

These would all allow us to create 'album' fields that display a LOT more info - would be great.

INTERACT FORUM

Author Topic: Calculated Fields -- What Would You Like? (Read 6979 times)

V-Man

nila

nila

zevele10

Marko

zevele10

nila