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[matthewmattical]

Sorry if this has been covered previously, but I couldn't find any threads about it. WMP9 supports multiple genre (and artist) tags in a very simple setup that I think MJ could adopt easily. All you have to do is, for example, type "Rock; Pop" as the genre name...and then the file will be listed under both of those genres when browsing in the tree view.

It's just a simple semi-colon parsing method that would work smoothly and easily. Would this be a possibility for MJ 9? I think a lot of people would love the ability to do this. Thanks.

[nila]

You can always do this yourself, Just create new fields and enter the extra genre's in there.
Or you could just use one of the custom fields and fill that with the extra genre's.

I see what your asking though and it's definitely a nicer, smoother solution. The above is just a work around.

[michel]

Some posts told about the way to store multiple values in a single field.

About 'genre' I don't agree because it is a "standard" field. But indeed to be able to set a 'multiple values' property to a custom field could be a good idea. But may be there are performance issues.

Right now you can do it using smartlists but it is a little tedious.

[Matt]

OK, we just had a big discussion about this here.

I added a "list" type database field so we could play around.  And basically, what we realized is that our playlist system is a lot cooler for doing this sort of thing.  The graphical selection of playlists and the ability to do multiple nesting levels is the hands down winner.

However, we need to make some ease-of-use enhancements to make using playlists for organization really practical.  Look for some improvements over the next few builds...

[michel]

I cannot wait to play with that !

But, please, make it in order this information is stored in the file into a "normal" tag (as a string), not into a proprietary metadata tag.

[Matt]

Just to be clear, our decision was to not have a list data type, but instead improve the playlist system.

[michel]

Indeed it was not clear to me !

To be clear myself: it doesn't make sense to me to spend a lot of time to set musical genre/style (or anything else such as people into pictures) through any system if it is not possible to reuse this information (at least as a string) without MJ.

I love MJ but I don't want weeks of pacient work wasted in case I have to abandon MJ (to go to Linux or whatever the reason).

[matthewmattical]

Matt,
I'm having trouble envisioning how the playlist system will work to handle multiple genres. I have previously attempted methods such as using smartlists (making them all manually) for each sub-genre that I have tagged under one of my custom fields, so that I can have more than one sub-genre for each genre. This didn't work out very well and definitely took a lot of patience to set up.

Sorry if I'm a little slow...but could you explain how the playlist setup is going to work out?

[JimH]

Please give Matt a break here and let him program.  If you'll be patient for a few more builds, things will get more clear.

Thanks.

[michel]

[smartlists...] This didn't work out very well and definitely took a lot of patience to set up.

I found that works very well but I agree that needs patience to set up...

[Phydeaux]

Having been involved in the big discussion about playlists and tagging multiple genres etc. let me explain, to the best of my ability, what the resolution was:

We're not talking smartlists at all, but normal playlists.

Create a Playlist Group called Genre. Underneath this group, create multiple playlists of the genres that you want: eg: house, rock, pop, indie, alternative and so on....

Now, depending on your song, you assign it to the different playlists (it can go on more than one, which is the key issue here...).

Now, in Media Library, you can create a view scheme, but instead of using Genre as a view field, choose Playlist Group and then choose the Genre group that we made just now.

Matt and the team are aiming to make this whole process a little easier and a little more intuitive. Hooray!

I can't wait for future builds!



P.

[matthewmattical]

Gotcha. Thanks for the info. I've heard of this method before and I think I'll wait for future builds to get into setting it up. Cool.

[KellerDH]

For the genre tag, I use a two-tiered naming system like Rock/Progressive or Rock/Folk ... then I made a few Smartlists of the main genre types (Rock, Jazz, Blues, Other, etc.) in which, for Rock as an example, I just typed in the critia: "genre=[rock".  Then in my View Scheme I created a "Genre" view with those Smartlists on top and the actual genre tag as the second level in the tree.  

All this yields a view with a tree that looks like this:

Genre
   +Classical
   +Jazz
   +Other
    -Rock
                +Rock
                                     -Rock/Folk
                                                   +Artist
                                                                     +Album
                +Rock/Punk
                +Rock/Progressive


Hope this helps.  Works fine for me.

[michel]

That doesn't help if you want set several "same-level" values in a field (for exemple several people names in a field 'people'). Your way is more to represent a hierarchy. In fact they are two différents problems.

[KellerDH]

You might just be right, in that my reply isn't a direct match to the original poster ... though I was at a slight loss as to the intent of that person.  I guess I assumed that the goal was to get a track included on two lists in the genre department.  My system does this, and I thought it might help.  If, under my system, one were to label said track "Rock/Pop", then if one were to select Play for the "Rock" branch of the tree at the topmost layer, one would also include the Rock/Pop tracks.  And if one wished to just Play the pop tracks, one would get to that group simply by going down one level to the Rock/Pop branch.

[matthewmattical]

MJ development team: if you're busy, don't bother reading this, as you've probably already read about the issue from other users.

KellerDH's suggestion is similar to the setup I had going before upgrading to MJ 9. The problem is, I'm using the genre tag for single, broad genre names and a custom field that contains multiple sub-genres (separated by "/"). When I make playlists for all those sub-genres and then make a view scheme with "genre/sub-genre playlist group", the entire list of sub-genres is listed under every genre. So...I'm not sure how this will work out even with the upgraded playlist properties features.

[NoCodeUK]

Hoehater>  Have you tried adding a search keyword to your custom field?  This may work.  It worked for me when I did something similar.  Try adding subgenre= into the keyword sectionunder tree and view settings.

Adam

[Matt]

It does list all of the sub-playlists instead of just the applicable playlists.  This was done for performance, but we will re-visit the issue and see what we can do.