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[Mastiff]

I have a slight problem - I want a field with Artist - Album. The problem is that I can't use a calculated field since this slows down the use. This is for NetRemote's album cover browsing, and if I use a calculated field as a browsing item it takes a lot longer (4-5 times) to show the covers. When there can be up to 70 covers on one page it will take far to long to show them. So can I in some way copy the Artist (or even better Album artist (Auto) field and the Album field into this one field I have created called "Artist - Album"?

I created a user field called "Artist - Album" and used "Fill properties from filename", with the directory name as the criteria, since I have all my music in directories named Artist - Album. Then I choose not to store it in ID3 tags (since updating and then doing a full new synchronization of more than 50 000 tracks will take a couples of days...). This works. But it's weird that I had to go through such lengths to do this. Also the directory names aren't totally accurate (for instance it's impossible to call a directory "AC/DC - Back in Black", it will be "AC_DC"). So can anybody give me a better solution here? I'd really appreciate any pointers!

[Dragyn]

Have you tried "Move / Copy Fields"?

[Mastiff]

Yes, I sure have. But it doesn't have an additive option, so it removes what's in the field already. Which means that if I first copy [Artist] to [Artist - Album] and then the [Album] field all I will be stuck with is another field where only the Album info is.

[Dragyn]

I just tried it.

Made a calculated temp field: [Album Artist (auto)] - [Album]

Then I made the "Artist - Album" field. Then I did a copy field between the two and it filled up just fine.

Maybe I'm not understanding what you want.

[Mastiff]

Man, you're a genius! Of course! I never thought about that second step - calculated to static field! But what version are you using? I can't see any calculated fields when I try to copy fields. I see Album artist (auto) but not for instance Album artist - Album (year). Do you use 11? Then this may be something that is added there.

[Jaguu]

I did the same thing as Dragyn suggested 2 days ago and it really worked fine. I did it with MC11, it might not work with earlier versions.

Some time ago I had split the fields NAME and MOVEMENT for classical music, but now I found that it was not worth to have an extra field MOVEMENT for that and decided to join the 2 fields again. Worked as mentioned above. Afterwards you can delete the extra fields.

It might be nice to have functions such as join fields and split fields and also regular expression support for search+replace.

[Dragyn]

I think the caculated copying was added in 11.

Edit:

11.0.5 (6/9/04)

12. Changed: Non-editable fields (i.e. calculated fields, etc.) can be used as the source in the "Move / Copy Library Fields" tool.

[Mastiff]

I was afraid of that. In my house WAF is king...er...queen, so I can't take the chance on using anything that's not 100 % stable (have I mentioned this before, perhaps?), so 11 is probably months away from my system, I'm afraid. Of course I could do a really big one: Install 11, create and copy the fields, store them in the tag, go back to 10 and finally do an update. But of course I won't. Overkill is my word for something like that...again there's the 50+ K tracks that has to be backed up again...

[Alex B]

So now you have at least one good reason to upgrade when MC 11 is ready.  

[Mastiff]

Actually I have many, it's just that it will take tiiiiiime. I hope it will happen in 2004, but I'm not holding my breath... The main reasons to upgrade are enhancements to the NetRemote part.

[Dragyn]

Is it just because of the plugins and stuff?

I find v11 very stable and I don't think it should be labeled as alpha.

[Mastiff]

I tried it on my work computer a month or so ago, and it had two crashes during the 12-14 hours I played music on it. Which makes it totally useless for me. But then again maybe big things has happened in that time?