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[Armaegis]

1) Is there a way to see which playlists a particular song already belongs to? I do a lot of music/dj duty for local dances and radio programs and keep playlists for all my events. Being able to see which songs I've played for which events is a very useful tool for me in managing my library and creating future playlists.

In itunes I could just right click on a song and hover over the "show in playlist" option. Is there anything like that in MC?


2) Is there a way to use an "OR" operator in the smartlists? Putting in additional rules seems to be an automatic "AND" operator. For example, say I wanted all songs by artist: Louis Armstrong or with a BPM < 150.


3) Is there a way to exclude certain fields in the audio analysis? A lot of my music has already been bpm'd manually, but doing analysis rewrites the bpm tags (often inaccurately in my case).


Thanks

[marko]

Morning Armaegis...

#1. Tooltips are enabled by default. Providing you haven't turned them off, when you hover the mouse over a track, you should get a tooltip that provides information about the track, including which playlists it currently belongs to...

You can also open the "Tag" action window in the lower left of the program and click on "Playlists" for a visual indication of which playlists selected track(s) belong to. If you do not see the Playlists entry in the tag window, then right click anywhere inside the window and follow the "Also Show.." menu to find, and click on, Playlists.
When you then click on the Playlists entry in the tag window, you will see a tree representation of your playlists.
A tick indicates that all files belong to that playlist
A filled square indicates that some of the selected files belong to that playlist
An empty square indicates that no files belong to that playlist

You can click in the squares to add/remove files from playlists.

#2. ([artist]="Louis Armstrong" or [BPM]=<150)

#3. You cannot exclude the BPM field from analysis, but what you can do is copy all your current BPM data to another field for safe keeping, analyse your audio, then copy your original BPM data back to the BPM field...
Tools > Options > Library and Folders > User Library Fields > Add Field
Name the field anything you like, beepm, for example, and press the OK button as the defaults will be fine for this purpose.
Next, use the "Also Show" menu in the tag window to include your new field.
Make sure all audio files concerned are listed on the right, then click on beepm to edit it. Simply type in =[BPM] and press enter to have the bpm data copied over to your new field.
Do audio analysis, and when it's done, click on the BPM field to edit it, and type in =[beepm] to copy back your original BPM data.
If you're a tidy type of person, you could now go back into library and folders options and delete that beepm field as you should no longer need it.

-marko

[marko]

If you do a lot of heavy playlist work, you might find it worth your while to experiment with a view scheme that uses a "Playlist Group" pane.
Depending on your workflow, they can potentially be very useful indeed.

[Armaegis]

Thanks for the replies Marko.

#1. I guess I was so intent on finding something with a right-click I didn't even notice the info popping up automatically. That playlist action window is handy too. Random bug I noticed: the playlist action window doesn't show the scroll bar; it just has a black line instead (and just to check, I can't click/select anything in the black line). I can still scroll with a mousewheel though. If I expand any of my playlist folders within the window, then my scrollbar will appear.

#2. That works in the search bar, but is there a way to do the same in the smartlists?

edit: nevermind, just figured it out... had to use the "custom" field.

#3. Ooh, I really like being able to work fields like that. I feel like I'm just beginning to scratch what MC can do.

If you do a lot of heavy playlist work, you might find it worth your while to experiment with a view scheme that uses a "Playlist Group" pane.
Depending on your workflow, they can potentially be very useful indeed.

I've mostly just been using folders and subfolders, but I've recently started messing around with the panes again. I got a taste of it when I was experimenting with foobar2000 about half a year ago.

[Alex B]

#3. Alternatively you can just disable tag writing in the field specific options:

Tools > Options > Library & Folders > Standard Library Fields > BPM (click the field name to open the edit window) > Store in file tags when possible (untick this)

This would prevent MC from altering the BPM field in the physical tags. It could be enough of a fix if you mostly use the BPM value outside MC (e.g. with a DJ program) and don't care if the value inside the library is sometimes a bit different.

Though, if you have disabled tag writing in the field options you can always restore the old BPM values from the file tags:

select the files > right-click > Library Tools > Update Library (from tags)