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Author Topic: how to identify albums with more than one track date  (Read 325 times)

comox

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how to identify albums with more than one track date
« on: February 22, 2021, 12:30:32 pm »

Is it possible to create a smartlist that will identify all albums that have more than one date assigned to its tracks?

Can you please show me how to do this?
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wer

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Re: how to identify albums with more than one track date
« Reply #1 on: February 22, 2021, 01:07:30 pm »

This can be done, but it's a little tricky.

In MC, Albums don't really have dates, files do. This is because Albums don't really exist in MC; if a bunch of files share the [Album Artist] and [Album]tags, MC calls them an Album.

So to do what you want, MC has to compare across multiple files.  This can be done with the Grouping functions, but it can be slow with large libraries.

Create a new smartlist called "Multiple Dates" and paste this in to the Import/Export dialog when you configure it:
Code: [Select]
[Media Type]=[Audio] [=Right(GroupSummaryQuery(Album,Date),3)]=avg
This will basically find what you want, but there's a catch: multiple albums with the same name (like "Greatest Hits").  If you want it to work perfectly, you will have to create a custom database field, of type Calculated Data.  Call the field this:
Code: [Select]
AlbumArtist-Year-Album
with calculated data of this:
Code: [Select]
[Album Artist]-[Year]-[Album]
That definition should be unique enough do discriminate between multiple artists using the same album name.  If it's not for you, like if you have albums in both FLAC and MP3 format, then you will have to come up with your own definition. I leave that as an exercise for the reader.

Now you must modify your smartlist to use that custom field.  Change the smartlist definition to this:
Code: [Select]
[Media Type]=[Audio] [=Right(GroupSummaryQuery(AlbumArtist-Year-Album,Date),3)]

All this can also be done in a Panes view; you simply add the search as one of the searches in a search list pane.

Have fun.
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comox

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Re: how to identify albums with more than one track date
« Reply #2 on: February 22, 2021, 01:39:13 pm »

Brilliant, I'll give it a try.

Thanks, kindly.
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