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[Sapagrino]

Is it possible to create a field that allows me to select from a list of [tracks] in the library database, to associate with the current selection? 

I am also wondering if there is a unique identifier for each track in the database that one could reference manually, even if no way to do a pick list for what I want via my first question.

And, ideally, from a list of [albums] and [artists] in the database.

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I can think of myriad uses for this, if possible.  Just one example is when I'm listening to a track and hear a sound/technique/apparent musical influence that reminds me of another artist, album or song.  It would be neat to be able to tag that song with a link to the [song] it reminds me of.  A smartlist of songs that group linked [songs] could be interesting.  Think of linking: a) Neil Young's "Southern Man"; and b) LS's "Sweet Home Alabama."  Some way to define the nature of the link would be even better, but even just to be able to know there is some association between elements of your library would open up possibilities.

I thought of this when you added the feature that I think allows you to nicely forcibly "link" two songs together so connected songs don't get orphaned.  That's cool, too.  But, different than what I'm thinking above where it's more an association or a weaker sort of link than the link feature that goes all the way to forcing them to be played together.

Thanks for your consideration.

[Sapagrino]

To bump and restate:

Is it possible to create an Expression field where the pick list to populate the field is a list of every song title then present in the library?

Thanks.

[Sapagrino]

Bump?

Even knowing this isn’t possible and never will be would redirect my thinking in another direction.  Thanks.

[Sapagrino]

At the risk of talking to myself...

I see that if I select multiple tracks and look in the tagging window's display of "[Varies]" in each field, they all seem to have a drop down which looks to be a list of all values that populate that field for the selected tracks--except for the "Name" field (i.e., the song track's title).  I wonder if that is by design and to what extent that design decision is driven by a need to keep the software speedy, since a "Name" dropdown would have tens of thousands of values to populate)?  I'd like to believe you could just flick a switch to make "Name" behave like the others. , but I presume there's a reason it needs to be different.

In any case, if the answer to my initial question is can't/won't be done  , I guess I could think about playing around with keywords, where "Follow this Song With\[the second song's pasted Name]" is one of the keywords of the first song.  Along with "Precede this Song With\…," "Pair With\…," "Playlist With\…".  Or I could make the nested tag an album, artist...or genre, I guess.

So, best I seem to be able to do for now, is I've added a Keyword to Neil Young's "Southern Man":

"Play Before\Sweet Home Alabama"

and a Keyword in Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Sweet Home Alabama":

"Play After\Southern Man"

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But...this ain't so smartlist friendly.

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Ensuring I type the associated [song]'s title correctly is I guess less critical to my strategy, if getting it exact is static and not otherwise linkable in the database.  Still, as a practice, I'd rather get it exact so two instances of "this reminds of Hendrix's Star Spangled Banner" don't get misspelled and not grouped properly in the keyword pane.  If I challenge myself to always copy paste from the [song] I want to associate with into the first song's keyword field, that's best, but might be too hard to maintain that discipline without the pick list.

Of course, my workaround is a static sort of manual notation system.



My other use case to want to associate tracks with one another is that I see I have better luck getting my kids into my music when it's featured in Glee, could you believe?    It could be good to associate the original and Glee versions of, say, Aerosmith's "Dream On."  Not just in a dedicated one time playlist, but a way to more organically identify links between songs as you listen and it occurs to you.

Thanks for any consideration of my specific question "Is it possible to create an Expression field where the pick list to populate the field is a list of every song title then present in the library?" or new ideas that don't go that far, but are better than what I've come up with above.  Thanks again.

Eric

[ferday]

i don't understand what you are trying to do, and i suspect others have had a hard time following your logic

what do you want the smartlist to do exactly?

[Sapagrino]

Thank you.  I'm still thinking through the possibilities myself, but let me try to give an example or two of how it might work.  I'm sure there is more than one way to come at it.

In some sense, it's a musical version of the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon.

SETUP
Let's say I create some new fields (but, maybe nested keywords is better):

"Pair With" - two [songs] to play side-by-side, either one first
"Playlist With" - two [songs] to play within the same listening session/queue
"Play Right Before" - two [songs] to play side-by-side, the current one before the selected one
"Play Right After" - two [songs] to play side-by-side, the current one after the selected one

"Play During" - a [song] and a [photo] that play concurrently.  When the song is playing in theater mode, one of the photos that would come up during the song is any photo that was referenced in this field for the song.  When a slideshow containing the photo is playing, one of the songs that would somehow be flagged to play during the slide show is any song referenced in this field for the photo.

I suspect I could come up with a total of 5 or 10 of these that would give me ways of associating [songs].
If instead of a [song], you populate, say, the "Play Before" field with an [album], then the current song would play and then a random song from the referenced album would play.  If you populate it with an [artist], a random song from the referenced artist would play.  A [genre], a random song from that genre.

TAGGING EXAMPLES (for example see this link for inspiration: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Answer_song)

format of below is:
[Song] to be tagged - field to be populated (from above) - field value

Sweet Home Alabama - Play Right After - Southern Man
This Land is Your Land - Play Right After - God Bless America
God Bless America - Play Right Before - This Land is Your Land
I'm Your Hoochie Coochie Man - Plays Right Before - I'm a Man
I'm a Man - Plays Right Before - Mannish Boy
Rock and Roll Hoochie Koo - Pairs With - I'm Your Hoochie Coochie Man
Back in the USSR - Plays Right After - California Girls

Photo of the American Flag - Play During - God Bless America

[Imagine a Library where a couple hundred songs have been involved somehow in tagging such as above]

SMARTLISTS
Imagine I have two existing smart lists:

1. Good Stuff - All songs and images rated between 51 and 100, played randomly
2. 1 of each Artist - All the tracks that are in Good Stuff, played randomly, but remove duplicates of Artist [i.e., you get one good track from each artist; refreshing the smart list picks new tracks for each artist, and a new order]

I'm imagining NEW smartlists that would be something like this:

3. Good Stuff (connections) - Same that #1 does, but in putting those tracks in order, apply any connections amongst the Good Stuff tracks.
4. 1 of each Artist (connections) - Same that #2 does, but in picking one track for each artist and in setting the (otherwise random) order of the songs, apply any connections amongst the Good Stuff tracks.

If your library only had the songs above, and you played the "1 of each Artist (connections)" smartlist, JRiver would make this the playlist; it wouldn't allow two Muddy Waters songs, so it would leave out Mannish Boy.

1. Rick Derringer's "Rock and Roll Hoochie Koo"
2. Muddy Waters' "I'm Your Hoochie Koochie Man"
3. Bo Diddley's "I'm a Man"
4. Muddy Waters' "Mannish Boy"

5. Irving Berlin's "God Bless America" [the American Flag photo appears when playing this song in Theater mode]
6. Woody Guthrie's "This Land is Your Land"

7. The Beach Boys' "California Girls"
8. The Beatles' "Back in the USSR"

9. Neil Young's "Southern Man"
10. Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Sweet Home Alabama"


The four groupings above could appear in any order, given what I've laid out.

If you did this kind of "associating" for a few hundred songs, it wouldn't take long before the smart list could be filled with an uninterrupted string of linked songs

I hope I'm clear, even if a little nutty for wanting to do this.  Thanks for any thoughts, or follow-up questions where I'm not clear, including whether you think new custom fields or some nested keyword approach would be more easily query-able as I try to create Expressions that might implement this.  Thanks.

Eric

[ferday]

this is really complicated as i'm sure you know.  it isn't really possible to directly link tracks (other than the literal direct link that currently exists) and there will likely never be a way to call out play functions from a tag (but who knows...)

if you used numbers, you might be able to leverage isequal() and play tracks that had the same numbers.  possibly even groups of numbers with some maths.

each file does have a key, which you can access using filekey() if you can find a way to use it.

playdoctor already does some associations, if you are smart with your tagging you can lead it down a certain path and get associations that make sense to you...

[swiv3d]

Is it possible to create an Expression field where the pick list to populate the field is a list of every song title then present in the library?

And I am going to scroll through a list of 70,000 song titles to find one I can link to? This might work if you have a few dozen files but I can't see even the most avid linker having the patience to do this with an average sized library.

[Sapagrino]

So, with the long game as background, maybe best to reset.  Let's assume I'm starting with a field called "Playlist Notes".  I currently put in there notes like "pair with Neil Young's Southern Man", "goes good after God Bless America", "reminds me of when Dylan went Electric," "samples Stevie Wonder's "Superstition"".

At a minimum, I'd like a more structured way of taking notes like above.  So, at a minimum, some sort of keyword convention just to store comments under set nested keyword categories seems one better way than what I'm doing now.  But, maybe I should set up a new separate field that would do the same thing as the keyword field, with nested grouping (e.g., Pair With\[song]).

[swiv3d]

There is a comment field so some kind of structured comment sytem might help, but I can't see your before and after scenario ever getting off the ground, there is simply no way to achieve it. You could perhaps make up a series of playlists which link files and then use a smartlist to select a range of them to put together. You could do the same with mixed media playlists to link specific songs with a .jpg and then use a smartlist to put a nbumber of them together in a random fashion.

[blgentry]

I've just been playing with this a little bit.  I've got something working, but it's not super elegant.

First, I made a new field called "Play With" and made it Integer type.  Next I set up a new Panes view with "Play With", then Artist, then Album.  I set an advanced option in the View called "filter in both directions".

In the columns list below the panes, where you see the songs, I added a new column:  Expression column titled "fk" with the expression "filekey()".  So now the fk column contains the unique identifier for each song in my library.

Now, I found a song that I wanted to associate with another song.  I see it's file key.  First, I duplicate that file key into the "Play With" column for that song.  I note this number; in my case it is 2023.  Now, I go find another song that I want to associate with this one.  Then I type 2023 into it's "Play With" field.  Note that you can do this right in the panes view by slow clicking on the field you want to edit.

Now those songs have the same Play With value *and* it should be unique, as I'm using file keys as my seed for this operation.  I could add other songs if I want to associate them as well by using the same Play With value.

So let's say I'm browsing my library with this panes view and I see a song that has a Play With field set.  If I click on this song, my PANE up top that says "Play With" should narrow itself down to showing *only* that Play With value.  So I'll see a matching value up there in the Play With pane.  Click on that.  Now all artists that have matching Play With values appear in the Artist pane next to the Play With pane.  Finally, I click on All Artists in the Artists pane and BINGO, I see all songs that share the same Play With value.

Elegant?  No way. It's kinda ugly.  Usable?  Maybe.  Something to play with perhaps.

Brian.

[timwtheov]

Seems like Blgentry's got one version of the mechanics right. But as swiv3d said, it would take you a lifetime to manually tag tracks with associative tags, unless you've got a pretty small library.

What you could do, if you've got some time to get it setup, is use MCUtils to retag your albums using amg.pl (which gets metadata from Allmusic) or discogs.pl (which gets metadata from Discogs) and use those sites' "Styles" or "Moods." For example, if you had Neil Young's "Southern Man," you could go to https://www.allmusic.com/song/southern-man-mt0004579315 and utilize the "Song Styles" and/or "Song Moods" (or use the whole album's styles and/or moods) and then build smartlists around these categories. I do this myself. The problem is, of course, that you to have to depend on Allmusic or Discogs' associations, which for the Neil Young/Lynyrd Skynyrd example you gave don't overlap much ("Album Rock" in "Song Styles" and "Confrontational" in "Song Moods" seem to be about it for "Sweet Home Alabama" and "Southern Man:" https://www.allmusic.com/song/sweet-home-alabama-mt0005503284). Still, without manually going through all your library, that's about it for any tagging automation for this kind of project.

Anyway, just a suggestion.

[Sapagrino]

Thanks for these ideas.  Hoping to dig back in soon.