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[FenceFurniture]

With the Soloists field, where it contains two or more people delimited by a ; is there a way of displaying which tracks a particular artist is on? What I'm driving at is that I have one album that has
Alexei Lubimov; Manfred Huss; Ronald Brautigam
and another album(s) with
Ronald Brautigam

How can I list all the albums on which Ronald Brautigam appears?

[EnglishTiger]

One of the simplest ways of listing all the tracks on which Ronald Brautigam appears is to create a Smartlist where one of the Rules is "Soloists is (or contains) Ronald Brautigam"

[wer]

You know how to create a smartlist, right Fence?

Create one with the rule Soloists contains whomever.  The will show tracks, because that's what a smartlist does.

If you insist on displaying albums, you could create a view with album as the top category, but including such a search rule as part of the view definition.

Or, have you tried just typing the soloist's name into the search box, when you're looking at any view you like?

[FenceFurniture]

Thank you chaps. The Smartlist works nicely, but the search box option is more dynamic.

[RoderickGI]

If you use the Wizard in the search box, MC will even give you the list of Artists in your Library, so you can just tick the box against them. Right-click in the box for the Wizard.

When the list of Artists is displayed, typing the first few letters of their name will scroll the list to near where they are.

All easier than remembering the spelling of some Artist's names, or how you may have abbreviated it.

[FenceFurniture]

Thanks Roderick. Actually you only have to click the disclosure arrow in the search box to bring up the wizard. Lots of options in there! Kinda like a temporary Smartlist. Probably the most useful is either "contains" or "starts with" because if the artist has never appeared by themselves, but has appeared with 3 different other groupings, then using the checkbox only brings up one of those groupings, whereas "contains" brings them all up.

E.g. see attached screenshot. Not possible to check Sviatoslav Richter because he's only in three combos.
Just in case you are wondering, I use an arrow → (Alt 26) to indicate a Conductor in the Artist to indicate "giving direction" to the Orchestra that follows the arrow. Just a little quirk of mine. 

[wer]

Yes, that's the problem with lists.  You'll be best served by using a contains rule, or typing a partial name in the search box, as I said.  That way you'll get the correct results whether the soloist is alone, or part of a list.

You can actually type full rules into the search box without the wizard if you memorize the syntax; that's what the wizard does, is build the query for you.

Now that you see how to do this for your soloists field, I'm sure you can see how the same approach can be adapted to other fields and types of searches.

Have fun!

[FenceFurniture]

Now that you see how to do this for your soloists field, I'm sure you can see how the same approach can be adapted to other fields and types of searches.

Yes indeed. This came up primarily because of the Jazz/Fusion world where everybody plays with everybody else in ten different permutations, and I want to be able to list the tracks (or maybe albums) that Marcus Miller plays on. (e.g.).

I don't really want to mix those people in with Classical soloists, so I'll set up a new field called Fusion Musician (or maybe Fuse Muse ). When I first had this idea, I started a field for the various common instruments (Guitar, Bass, Drums etc) but it quickly became apparent that is was going to be (too) cumbersome, probably unworkable, and a staggering amount of input. At least now I can reduce it down to just a staggering amount of input 

[RoderickGI]

I was talking about the Search Box FenceFurniture. My installation doesn't have a Disclosure Triangle in the Search Box. But it does have a Magnifying Glass icon, which when clicked displays the right-click menu. Maybe your Skin works differently.

I think part of your issue is that you are using fields in unintended ways, and creating fields (or thinking about it) when they are not required.

You should list Artists in the [Artist] field, using the";" delimiter. Then every Artist will be searchable, and the checkbox next to their name will include them in a Search.
You should list Composers in the [Composer] field. Then if you want to find music by a particular Artist and Composer, you just use two rules. If you add a Composer rule first, then an Artist rule, only Artists that have worked with the selected Composers are displayed in the dropdown list. i.e. The Search, Smartlist, View is prefiltered.
You should use the [Genre] field to add a new "Fusion Musician" Genre, not set up a new [Fusion Musician] field.
You could even add Guitar, Bass, Drums, etc. to Keywords, or set up sub-Genres for them, all without creating new fields.

Then use the Views, Smartlists, and Searches to find and display what you want, based on consistent use of the fields in MC.


But it is your music and Library, and I am not familiar with all the data you have in your Library, so whatever way works for you is fine. I would do things differently though. 

[FenceFurniture]

I'm using the Black on Black skin.

Sometimes I suffer from a little indecision, and that's what happened with how I enter the Artists info. Currently in the process of cleaning that up to use ; delimiting. I do use the Composer and Orchestra fields.

For Classical, I use use the Artist fields for the primary artists, so perhaps two Soloists and a Composer→Orchestra, or perhaps just the latter. With some albums there are just too many Soloists to list this way, particularly Choral works, so they just go into the Soloists field. The reason for all that is the way I have it displayed for each composer (screenshot attached). Usually I like to have the JR window over to the right 35-40% of the screen (27") and if the Artists is too long with all the soloists it either gets hidden or at least a little long winded to read. The screenshot shows the latest experiment using "performed by" etc

[wer]

I think the way you're using Soloists is perfectly reasonable Fence, especially when it comes to jazz.

There are a lot of different schools of thought about Artist, so your indecision is understandable.  For instance, to me, for classical music, Artist must be the composer.  This is because to me, Artist is the one most responsible for the music.  Other people might think that is insane, and the Artist should definitely be the performer, and others would say the conductor, or the orchestra.  It's an unresolvable argument. And for popular music, I'm hypocritical and insist the Artist is the performer: I care not a jot who wrote the song Sinatra is singing.  But who cares?  We have all these fields so one can do what makes sense oneself, and everyone else can go pound sand.

You just have to be consistent. Pick a rule for classical and stick with it. Having a different ethos for classical vs rock causes me no problems at all. But if you don't tag all your music within a genre consistently, that way lies madness...

At the end of the day, you're trying to 1) please yourself so things make sense to you, and 2) to make it as easy as possible on yourself (without violating rule 1).

[FenceFurniture]

Yes, a lot of my indecision and 'questionable' methods and classifications was born out of the steep JR learning curve that I was (and still am) on. There are other ways around these problems, but at the time I tended to take the one I could figure out.

A prime example of that is that I put the composer as the album artist because at that time, that was how it was displaying, and Classical was all in with everything else BUT I want all the classical together, so I incorporated a © which grouped them all together at the top of the list. (so I have "© Bach, Johann Sebastian" as the Album Artist)

Until 10CC and 2Cellos came along and buggered it up nicely!

At that point I created two different lists to display (asked some questions on here and got lots of help from you, Roderick and others). I still quite like using the © symbol for composers (because they had the original copyright plus it's a "c" for composer, and "c" for Classical), so have kept it. In the Windows folders I also use an ® for the recorded year (couldn't care less when the Record or CD was released), and an Em space (equivalent to three spaces) makes things very easy to read. E.g. from the Beethoven folder:

Violin Concerto in D [Op.61] ©1806 ®1973 H.Szeryng–V, B.Haitink→Royal Concertgebouw O [SACD] v1

Not that folder names are particularly important within JR itself, but that folder name actually contains quite a lot of info. (v1 indicates that there is another version of this piece)

Like you, I regard the composer as the person most responsible for the classical music, and technically I should swap my Artist and Album Artist, but that is just not going to happen any time soon.

[FenceFurniture]

The other thing about doing all this fooling around is that I am not only learning a lot about JR, but also about Classical music which I have only had a smallish exposure to until lately. I'm slowly piecing together when they were all around, who were contemporaries, and so on. Mozart giving some lessons to a cranky young Beethoven, who was born the year that Capt Cook "discovered" Australia, and so it goes on.

[wer]

Well, despite what I said before, some of that does sound highly questionable! 

I think adulteration of fields with special symbols just to achieve sorting is probably a bad practice.

I suggest your next endeavor should be to learn how to create custom sort methods.  By utilizing this functionality, you can have all the classical together (first, last, or other) without putting any weird characters in. Once a custom sort is defined and saved, it can be used in any of your views.  It's a very powerful tool, and I use it extensively in Theater View, where one has no option to click column headings to change the sort order.

[FenceFurniture]

You should use the [Genre] field to add a new "Fusion Musician" Genre, not set up a new [Fusion Musician] field.
You could even add Guitar, Bass, Drums, etc. to Keywords, or set up sub-Genres for them, all without creating new fields.

I may not have been clear about my intention for that field Roderick. (and I am already using Genre for Fusion, Jazz etc to describe the music)

It is not to identify a certain Soloist as a "Fusion Musician", but rather to be used exclusively for Fusion Musicians in the same way as I would prefer to keep Soloists strictly for Classical musicians (and it's already a fairly long list with a small slider as a result). So I would would have in the Fusion Musician field:
Stanley Clarke; George Duke; Ray Gomez; etc
and in Instrument:
Bass; Keyboards; Electric Guitar; etc

It is meant to be a general piece of info to identify which albums what musos played on. To get the real nitty gritty of who played which particular kind of bass on which track I already have looked up Wikipedia and Discogs and copied the info in the Musicians field that I created (for non-Classical only), and for those musos listed above that info looks like this (just a cut and paste from the website):

Stanley Clarke – electric bass guitar (1,3,5,6), vocals (1,6), handbells (1), acoustic piano (2,3), piccolo bass guitar (2,3,6), humming (3), acoustic bass (4,6), gong (6), chimes (06), arranger, conductor, producer
George Duke – keyboards (6)
Ray Gomez – electric guitar (1,3,5), rhythm guitar (3)
Icarus Johnson – acoustic guitar (6), electric guitar (6)
John McLaughlin – acoustic guitar (4)
David Sancious – keyboards (1), Minimoog (2,3), organ (3), electric guitar (5)
Gerry Brown – drums (1,3), handbells (1)
Billy Cobham – drums (6), Moog 1500 (6)
Steve Gadd – drums (2,5)
Milt Holland – percussion (3), triangle (4)
Trombone - Tom Malone & Dave Taylor
Trumpet - Jon Faddis, Alan Rubin & Lew Soloff
Horns - Earl Chapin, John Clark, Peter Gordon & Wilmer Wise
Brass - Al Aarons, Stewart Blumberg, George Bohanon, Buddy Childers, Robert Findley, Gary Grant, Lew McCreary, Jack Nimitz, William Peterson, Dalton Smith
Strings - Marilyn Baker, Thomas Buffum, David Campbell, Rollice Dale, Robert Dubow, Janice Gower, Karen Jones, Dennis Karmazyn, Gordon Marron, Lya Stern, Ron Strauss, Marcia Van Dyke & John Wittenberg


Absolutely ZERO chance of me entering the data for each track! It will only be for the main band too - silly to enter all those String players names when they might be on one or two tracks. In the example above I would cut off at Milt Holland.

The problem with using Instrument for the above is that currently Bass means Bass voice - I suppose I could change singers to Basso....hmmmm.

[FenceFurniture]

Well, despite what I said before, some of that does sound highly questionable! 

I think adulteration of fields with special symbols just to achieve sorting is probably a bad practice.

Nah, it's fine man! Not actually needing it for the sorting now though - I could take out the © with a simple command in Find and Replace if I really wanted to.

Jeez, if you think that's crook then this'll REALLY make yer head spin (these are Album names):
♫ Pavarotti, Luciano
indicates that he is not the composer, but a performer that I have a CD of. Same for
♫ Three Tenors  (I never use "The" either but that did cause me quite some consternation when it came to British band "The The" - which "The" should I eliminate, first or second? Or should it be "The, The"?

♫ Janis, Byron is just a small collection of bits and pieces he plays from various composers
♫ Chopin:  Artur Pizarro Plays Chopin
is when a musician is playing a selection of all different things with different opera numbers by one composer, but if it was Artur Pizarro playing all Chopin's Etudes then it would be:
Chopin:  Etudes I [Op.10] v2 (and Artur Pizarro would be the only Artist, and v2 is the second version of Etudes)

Basically one Opus number for one album, or for a collection it is ♫. Yes, that does mean if the CD has three Piano Sonatas then it becomes three different albums in JR but maybe still all in the same Windows folder.

[Dawgincontrol]

If what you're looking for is a view for each artists individual contribution, you could do that through a View scheme. 

I have set up one on mine which lists every artist on each track separated by a semi-solon in a field I manually set up, though I believe you could use the "People" tag which came along later.  Data had to be entered manually, but you could use "Move and Copy" if need be.  I like to keep my "Soloists" separate.

[timwtheov]

Another suggestion, in addition to all the good stuff Wer and Roderick and everyone else said: try MCUtils (search Interact to find it).

There's a learning curve (of course), but you can get everything standardized with either amg.pl (which tags from AllMusic) or discogs.pl (which tags from Discogs). Because the tagging is album-based, there are some gaps (for sure with amg.pl, which is what I mostly use, and more particularly with classical, which can be spotty, especially with box sets), but there are workarounds. It's great to get all the genres and "styles" for different albums and artists, for example, or get all your classical works standardized, not to mention all the artists, composers, etc. Basically, both are metadata goldmines, and with it + smartlists + theater view customization, you can get JRiver working a bit like Roon without the cost.

[FenceFurniture]

Thanks for those last two suggestions.



Currently I'm in the process of cleaning up any Soloists and Artists that might have two different spellings of their name. What would be really useful is if I could produce a list of all the Soloists, with just one entry for each different name. Reason being that if I display all the Classical files, and sort them into ascending Soloists, one album might have soloists
A; Z; C

and I don't necessarily know if Soloist Z appears anywhere else, either with or without different spelling. (and a cut and paste of each individual name into the Search box is not feasible, time wise)

Is it possible to produce such a list?

[FenceFurniture]

If you use the Wizard in the search box, MC will even give you the list of Artists in your Library, so you can just tick the box against them. Right-click in the box for the Wizard.

I know from this post that I can put Soloists in the Wizard Rules, but the list of Artists is in a very small window (it's a workaround). What I would like to be able to produce is that same list in one display so that I could copy and paste it into Excel.

EDIT: I thought I may have had it by adding a Modifier of "Remove Duplicates of" but of course that still puts up multiple soloists entries that may or may not include repeats of the same soloist (if they are in two different permutations).

[RoderickGI]

Is it possible to produce such a list?

Yes.

Make a Panes view with the first field set to Soloists. Then you should be able to see all the Soloists, and select duplicates which have different spelling, and edit them to match all in the one View. You may need to put partial names into the Search Box to pull mis-spellings together. i.e. With a search like [Soloists]=Moz for example, to find variations of "Mozart".

If you can do that, do you need to copy a list into Excel?

Getting a simple list of all Soloists into Excel when there are multiple Soloists on some files is a little difficult, but this comes close:
1. Copy the Audio > Files View to a new View just to create this list.
2. Set the View's "Group By" to None.
3. Make sure that the [Soloists] field is included in the View and remove all columns from the View except [Soloists].
4. In the Search Box, enter ~nodup=[Soloists]
5. Sort the Details View shown in the bottom Pane by Soloist, so they are sorted by the Soloists names. This is where it will be easy to see files that have multiple Soloists.
6. Select all files in MC and press Ctrl+C to copy everything in the View.
7. Open Excel and paste the data using the "Paste > Use Text Import Wizard" function. Select Delimited, Next, Semi-colon (turn off Space), Finish. You will then have a spreadsheet of all Soloists, although where there was more than one for a file, you will have multiple columns of data. You will need to clean that up in Excel.

That will give you a good start. I can't think of a quick way to just pull out the list of Soloist name in one column just now. Maybe one of the third party utilities, MCUtils, Swag of Tools, etc. could do it. Not sure.

[FenceFurniture]

Fantastic Roderick, thank you for all that detail. I'll pursue that a little later, after the current task.

I may not need to export it to Excel, it's just that I'm far more competent with Excel/VB code than I am with JR (but certainly improving the latter).

[FenceFurniture]

The panes view is sufficient for this, thanks.

[Dawgincontrol]

You can use "Find and Replace" to quickly fix all the misspellings once you find the first one.  One other thing you might run into is the use of nicknames, proper names vs. informal names (ie Robert - Bob) as you go through.  I found that to be true in my "All Artists" view.  Easily fixed, but may not get listed near each other for quick recognition.

[EnglishTiger]

Is it possible to produce such a list?

If you are asking is it possible to produce a list of "Individual Soloists present in a Delimited Field" in MC then yes, but I doubt if you would be able to export it to some external editor.

If you look in the upper section of the attached screenie you will see there are 2 delimited fields showing, Genre and Composer - but each line only has 1 genre and 1 composer listed. But in the lower section both Genre and Composer are presented as a List.

[EnglishTiger]

Something I forgot to mention - that "View" can, and does, act like a "Complex Multi-Condition Smartlist" that starts from a nothing has been selected so show everything state.
To be able to provide an example of Genres And Composers appearing as Individual Items and Lists I selected 10cc as The Album Artist. If I was then to click on an "Item" in one of the other columns the "Smartlist" would automatically refine itself; i.e. clicking on "10cc" in the Artist Column the bottom panel would only show those tracks where 10Cc was the "Album Artist" and the "Artist"; Clicking on "Eric Stewart" in the "Composer" column and the bottom column would only show those tracks where 10cc was the Album Artist, and the Artist and the Composer Tag contained Eric Stewart. Removing a Condition/Rule from the "Smartlist" is just as simple - all you have to do is scroll to the top of the list and click on the All .... Entry.

Let's imagine you have set a similar view up with "Soloist" as one of the columns in the top panel and while scrolling through the list, which will be in alphabetical order and you happen to spot that their is a typo/mistake in one of the names; i.e. you see entries for "Fred Bloggs" and "Ferd Bloggs"

As I've already explained clicking on the "Ferd Bloggs" entry will rebuild/execute the "Smartlist" and only those tracks where the Soloist Tag contains "Ferd Bloggs". Since only the tracks that need correcting are in the lower panel most users reaction would be to select all those tracks, move the mouse into the "Soloist" tag, do a right click and select the Rename Option and edit/correct the tag. But that view has another trick tucked up it's sleeve; If After selecting "Ferd Bloggs" in the upper panel, to get the "Altered Smartlist" to execute on it then, without moving the mouse, do a right click and select the Rename Option any Alterations you make to a Soloist in the Top Panel will automatically get applied to the Tracks/Tags in the bottom panel. If the correct version of the soloists same was present in the top panel before you selected an "Individual Entry"; you don't even have to do any typing, you simply have to scroll down through the "All Soloists" list clicking on the Rename Option kindly provides.