I see that I probably want to limit this tagging scheme to general items, or does MC just tag with tags from the node that are all the same? If some Dead albums are tagged with same genre but different subgenres and I drag the files onto one genre/subgenre that's cool, but my Burned CD & Backed Up tags are going to vary within that genre/subgenre. I guess this is sort of obvious...just thinking out loud I guess. Very useful tool, thanks Glynor.
I think I get what you're asking, and I think if you play with it a bit (maybe on some "test" files) you'll see how it works. But, to give an example... Say I have a bunch of Grateful Dead songs from the Album "American Beauty" (but that aren't tagged at all). Also, assume that I've decided that all Grateful Dead songs should fall under the Genre "Psychedelic Rock", but they might all fall under different SubGenres depending on the "feel" of the individual song (that's not how I do it, but work with me here).
Ok, now assume I have two View Schemes. One is
Genre/Artist/Album/Subgenre and the other is
Genre/Subgenre (both with Populate Tree chosen of course). Now, say I want to tag all my new American Beauty files with these fields (but only these):
Genre = Psychedelic Rock
Artist = Grateful Dead
Album = American Beauty
If I already have tagged at least one file sometime previously which matches ALL of those fields, then when I expand the nodes in the tree under
Genre/Artist/Album/Subgenre the album will show up.
This could happen if somehow you already had part of the album, but just finished getting the rest of it (or maybe more likely if a few of the files got corrupted and you re-ripped just those few songs -- the rest of them are still there). To apply those tags, you could just drag-drop the new files and drop them onto the "American Beauty" item in the tree and, wha-pow, all of the "parent" tags get applied. However, since you had not expanded that last selection in the tree (Subgenre) and dropped the new files
there, the Subgenre field for the new files is left alone (meaning, if it's currently blank then it stays blank, and if there is something there it stays there).
Now, it's probably more likely that you just ripped an entire new album that you never had before, say "Dick's Picks Volume 20" (which incidentally was the show from the day I was born -- fairly cool that I'm a Dick's Picks). In that case, when you expand the tree in the example above, there will be no "Dick's Picks Volume 20" icon to drop the files on. That's okay though, just drop them on "Grateful Dead" in the above tree and it will still assign the Genre and Artist tags (and leave the rest alone). Then you can manually add the Album tag using the Tag Editor.
Now, to assign the Subgenre it's a little tricky (not really, but you have to understand what is happening). Say you have the
Genre/Artist/Album/Subgenre Scheme fully expanded. Some of the songs (the ones already there) are assigned to a few different Subgenres (like in the picture below).
You do not want to drop your new "Dick's Picks Volume 20" files onto "Jams" in the above example, because that would reassign the Album tag to "American Beauty" (it would correctly set the Subgenre to Jams, and the Artist to Greatful Dead, and the Genre to Psychedelic Rock though). Instead, you'd want to use your separate
Genre/Subgenre View Scheme and expand just "Psychedelic Rock" and then "Jams" and drop it there. Then it'll assign the Genre and Subgenre but leave the Artist and Album alone.
If you structure your View Schemes intelligently, you can use this method to greatly speed the tagging of large batches of files AND use the system to ensure your tags all stay consistent. For example, I have a set "list" of Genres that I use. Sometimes though, files come "pre-tagged" with stuff that doesn't match my Scheme (maybe Rock'n'Roll in the Genre field). If populate tree is turned on, you can quickly and easily see this "bad" genre and just grab all the offending files (just grab the Rock'n'Roll item in the tree) and drop it onto the Genre that it should be (maybe just plain vanilla "Rock" if that's what you like to use).
As another example, I can see in my screenshot above that I have some files tagged with "The Dead with Warren Haynes". It shouldn't be this way, and those should be filed under just plain vanilla "Dead, the" (and Warren's involvement would be noted in a different field). I can easily just right click on "The Dead with Warren Haynes" and rename it to "Dead, the" and it will change the Artist field for all of the songs "contained" in there. I could also drag-drop it if there already was one listed there (which it isn't because this is my work computer and I only have a small sub-set of my total music library here at work -- 6000 files or so).
PS. If an admin sees this, you may want to split these past few "tree tagging methods" posts off into their own thread. I can't do it myself.
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Topic: Idea: MC12 Requests and MC12 Forum (Read 86027 times)