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Author Topic: New Plugin: Field Control  (Read 4266 times)

nila

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New Plugin: Field Control
« on: November 04, 2003, 04:41:49 pm »

Ok,

I THINK!!!! King wants me to make a plugin to allow fields to be merged.

It's going to be called: Field Control (name suggestions welcomed!!)

Anyone else want this - any features people want in it?

Basically it's going to let you chose a playlist to work on,
let you select what files to deal with

Enter a field to copy to:
Enter a string to copy from:


ie:

Copy To: Artist Album
From: A bit like this [Artist] [Album]

Comments, suggestions, etc?


NOTE: The installer might not work - I'm famous for it!! LOL!!

Gimme input guys!! :)

Dont ask me to let you chose the fields to merge from a list cause it aint gonna happen - we just got a NO to that request for the SDK (u should have voted when the ballets were open!!) lol.

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lise

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Re:New Plugin: Field Control
« Reply #1 on: November 04, 2003, 05:12:03 pm »

Hey Nila,

Don't know if this is really relevant to what you want to do (perhaps it should be in "Clean File Properties" instead.  You decide).

I use Find/Replace all the time, and I am always left with semi-colons all over the place. I'd love something that got rid of them.

Eg.  Find "alt-pop-rock" in subgenre field, replace with ""

What do I get as a result?  a bunch of semi-colons that were at the end of "alt-pop-rock" because the original was something like "alt-pop-rock;garage;indie-rock".

Of course, I can include the semi-colon in my search, eg "alt-pop-rock;" and replace with "", but then I would have to do a second search on "alt-pop-rock" without the semi-colon for all those "alt-pop-rock"s that were at the END of my field (eg garage;indie-rock;alt-pop-rock) which of course do not require a semi-colon.

The main problem is that after doing my find/replace, I can't then just search for ";" and replace with "" because that would replace ALL semi-colons, including the legit separators.

Basically I need something that recognizes a semi-colon that has no entry in front of it. Something that asks:  Does this semi-colon have another semi-colon in front of it? If so, delete it. Does this semi-colon have no characters at all before it? If so, then delete it.
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kiwi

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Re:New Plugin: Field Control
« Reply #2 on: November 04, 2003, 09:34:28 pm »

There are two field creation/caculations that I'd like to have:

Album Rating = Sum(rating of all tracks in album)/number of tracks  

Album Gain = Min(dB Gain for all tracks in album) (an additional feature would allow it to copy the orig dB Gain values to a "track gain" field, so that you could easily switch between Album and Track gain for songs by copying the appropriate value into the gain field., but that could again easily be done manually.)

I wouldn't mind doing it by manually selecting the album before running the plugin.

kiwi
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gpvillamil

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Re:New Plugin: Field Control
« Reply #3 on: November 05, 2003, 01:44:34 am »

Allow for general parsing of strings, so you could things like:

Before:

[Name] Dick Dale - Misirlou
[Artist] Various Artists

Input:

parse [Name] as [Name] - [Artist]

After:

[Name] Misirlou
[Artist] Dick Dale

You can do this now by renaming file from properties, then changing the parse string, then populating properties from the filename, but it would be nice to be able to do it in one shot.
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nila

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Re:New Plugin: Field Control
« Reply #4 on: November 05, 2003, 02:53:51 am »

Glad to see quite a few idea's.

So far I'd also had this - it was going to have two panes:


One for Doing the field population and then another field that was going to set default values for fields based on search criteria (most DB's let you set a default value for a field but MC doesn't - the plugin would set a default value for any fields based on search criteria).

So you could for instance create a field called: Song Quality
then set up a rule like:

Search Criteria="" (empty)
Field Name = Song Quality
Default Value = OK


And the plugin will constantly check the library and update any fields that dont have a value set for the Song Quality and set it as OK if it finds it :)


The 'Album Rating' one is a great idea - I'll include that as I want it myself.


I'll also try include the others - any more suggestions?
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kiwi

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Re:New Plugin: Field Control
« Reply #5 on: November 05, 2003, 06:33:31 am »

Reposted from another thread:

Quote
I would love to be able to control the legth of individual parts of the file names that I construct.  I have quite a few classical albums that create filenames that are too long... and/or truncate the names at places that don't make much sense, I'd rather have some control over it.

i.e. when setting up the filename, have an optional value:
Dir: [Album Artist (auto) 20]\[Album 20] ~ [Date (year)] ~ [Genre 12]

File Name: [Track #] ~ [Name 30] ~ [Artist 20]

where the values in the brackets would be used to truncate the file names.  Ideally, they would be used only when the file names went over a max length, which optionally could be set.

kiwi
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kiwi

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Re:New Plugin: Field Control
« Reply #6 on: November 05, 2003, 06:37:24 am »

The 'Album Rating' one is a great idea - I'll include that as I want it myself.

This would be very cool if it could be generalized, i.e. setting the min/max/average of a set of songs for a rating.

Quote
I'll also try include the others - any more suggestions?

One other thought, I don't know how hard it would be, or if there are any nice library tools you could use, but Regular Expression find/replace could be handy for people.

kiwi
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sraymond

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Re:New Plugin: Field Control
« Reply #7 on: November 05, 2003, 08:35:51 am »

Alll these requests seem more than reasonable operations against a database.  I wonder if JRiver could open up access to the database - maybe with SQL?  If the database is home-grown (and there is no SQL (or SQL-like) API and JRiver won't develop one), I'd suggest something that I've brought up before:

Allow an XML import capability - both inserts and updates.  This would allow anyone to write their own XSLT or XQuery to modify an exported MPL.  And a plugin writer (Scott.!) could write a plugin that exports, applies the XSLT, and imports the modified XML.  Heck, maybe Scott. can even do the XML import capabilty himself...

Scott-
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nila

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Re:New Plugin: Field Control
« Reply #8 on: November 05, 2003, 09:06:50 am »

I was thinking something along those lines - I'm dying to open it up so info can be inputted into the db so I can syncronise my photo website with MC for my photo's - I'm planning to do an SQL input/output plugin at some point - only problem is my lack of free time these days :(


An input plugin would DEF. be desired.
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scott_r

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Re:New Plugin: Field Control
« Reply #9 on: November 06, 2003, 12:33:07 am »

Alll these requests seem more than reasonable operations against a database.  I wonder if JRiver could open up access to the database - maybe with SQL?  If the database is home-grown (and there is no SQL (or SQL-like) API and JRiver won't develop one), I'd suggest something that I've brought up before:

Allow an XML import capability - both inserts and updates.  This would allow anyone to write their own XSLT or XQuery to modify an exported MPL.  And a plugin writer (Scott.!) could write a plugin that exports, applies the XSLT, and imports the modified XML.  Heck, maybe Scott. can even do the XML import capabilty himself...

Scott-

Actually with the current state of the SDK it would be more than possible to do this. In fact it would be rather simple to import an MPL that contains all the necessary information. Don't know how fast it would be though... probably slower than exporting, at least. I might have a play around once I've finished building MC XML Export.

Scott.
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nila

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Re:New Plugin: Field Control
« Reply #10 on: November 06, 2003, 02:49:37 am »

Ok,
Also going to create tools for:

Remove X Chars from Beginning/Middle/End of Field [Blah]

If middle is chosen then extra option saying: Starting from position: J

Any other ideas too?
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gpvillamil

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Re:New Plugin: Field Control
« Reply #11 on: November 06, 2003, 03:16:51 am »

Make the delete option part of the parse string, so for example:

[Name] = 10 - Dick Dale - Misirlou

when parsed with [delete] - [Artist] - [Name] would yield:

[Name] = Misirlou
[Artist] = Dick Dale

or some kind of "delete until/from delimiter"

I can really see a lot of value in making this a general purpose regular expression search/replace tool.
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nila

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Re:New Plugin: Field Control
« Reply #12 on: November 06, 2003, 04:00:46 am »

Delete until from would be covered by replacing the middle of a string.

I'll have a look at the Wildcard stuff after I've made v1 of the plugin.
The only thing stopping me would be my lack of knowledge about VB programming and so not being able to implement it.
The rest of this stuff is all pretty easy stuff to do
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sraymond

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Re:New Plugin: Field Control
« Reply #13 on: November 06, 2003, 09:31:49 am »

Alll these requests seem more than reasonable operations against a database.  I wonder if JRiver could open up access to the database - maybe with SQL?  If the database is home-grown (and there is no SQL (or SQL-like) API and JRiver won't develop one), I'd suggest something that I've brought up before:

Allow an XML import capability - both inserts and updates.  This would allow anyone to write their own XSLT or XQuery to modify an exported MPL.  And a plugin writer (Scott.!) could write a plugin that exports, applies the XSLT, and imports the modified XML.  Heck, maybe Scott. can even do the XML import capabilty himself...

Scott-

Actually with the current state of the SDK it would be more than possible to do this. In fact it would be rather simple to import an MPL that contains all the necessary information. Don't know how fast it would be though... probably slower than exporting, at least. I might have a play around once I've finished building MC XML Export.

Scott.

That would be great...  I've been looking for a way to import metadata with thousands of artwork images on the internet.  The help file made it sound like this was possible, but I've gotten no response - see thread http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?board=3;action=display;threadid=9591;start=msg111864#msg111864

Scott-
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sraymond

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Re:New Plugin: Field Control
« Reply #14 on: November 06, 2003, 01:19:58 pm »

Niiolay's answers in the thread http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?board=3;action=display;threadid=9591 have cleared some things up.

How about a plugin that parsed the import MPL, deleted each item therein contained from the database, and then imported the MPL using the "Import Media" functionality?

A bit risky, maybe?

Scott-
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nila

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Re:New Plugin: Field Control
« Reply #15 on: November 07, 2003, 02:49:34 am »

Sounds like it's a new plugin not a 'Field Control' plugin for that.

We both want something along those lines thou Scott - we both I think want to be able to use the info from MC in other places and to be able to update and syncronise the various locations for our info.

It'll have to be in a different plugin thou from this one :)
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