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[paronsoda]

Hello

I just found  JRiver Media Center and like it a lot. However I have been using Windows Media Player before and there is one important  feature that I cant find in JRiver MC.

I have tagged many of my MP3 files with multiple genre, for example like this: Soundtrack; Rock

This way the song will show up both when I select "Soundtrack" or the "Rock" genre. But JRiver seems to create a new genre called "Soundtrack; Rock". This of course excludes this song from the other tracks that has just "Rock" as genre.

Is there or will there be any support for tags with multiple genre's?

Regards
Hans

[bil1010105]

Not sure about the multiple genres thing (others may be able to help there), but you can nest Keywords which works quite well.

So for example, instead of "Soundtrack; Rock" in the Genre tag you could have "Soundtrack\Rock" in the Keyword field instead. This has the advantage of showing like a tree if you create a view based on Keyword field. For example:

Soundtrack
     |- Rock
     |- Classical
     |- Spoken

etc.

[MusicHawk]

Genre can have just a single value, but Keyword can be many.

I use Genre for the song's broad/main category/keyword, but as you noted in MC it's a single-value field, I think to maintain compatibility with many other tag-using programs and devices.

For my real categorizing I use MC's Keywords field, which allows multiple values -- whatever will help me later select desired songs for smartlists or whatever. Within MC, views and selections can use Genre and/or Keywords (and other fields), but keywords provide more versatility.

As noted, its possible to enter keywords to create a nested list, though I haven't found this useful for my needs. I just use MC's views; my Keywords view automatically creates sections by every keyword in my entire library. If I give a song 5 keywords, that one song appears in 5 places, under each keyword. So, if I go directly to keyword Soundtrack I see all types of soundtracks. If I go to keyword Rock I see all types of Rock music. If I want Rock Soundtracks, I make a smartlist that selects these two keywords. This is where nested keywords might help, but there are challenges with songs that aren't easily put into a "nest", which is why I ended up using the flat categorization by keywords.

When the music is copied to an external location such as an iPod, Keywords (or better a smartlist) can be used to select the desired songs to copy. Usually only the Genre is carried across, so it has some potential use outside of MC. If it wasn't for this situation, I'd have little use for Genre.

If you're importing a bunch of music that has data in Genre, it's easy in MC to copy or move that data into the Keywords field. But I don't know what might happen to multi-value Genre data when it is first imported into MC's single-value Genre field.

[paronsoda]

Thanks bil1010105 and MusicHawk!

The Keyword field works great for me and for my personal use I think I will use flat categorization. But the nested style was a nice function.

MusicHawk you mentioned that it’s easy to copy or move data from the genre field to the Keywords field. As I'm totally new to MC could you please give me a little hint of how to do it?

Thanks for all the help
Hans

[MusicHawk]

To move or copy data between fields, go to Library Tools > Move/Copy Fields... (You can get to Library Tools several ways, including right-click when on one or more music files.)

Pick Source field, Destination field, and desired action: Move, Copy or (my fav) Flip-flop.

I recently used this to flip-flop Artist and Album Artist values for 70 thousand music files, with just one click (and plenty of time to make a sandwich while MC munched on the files).

If you're curious, I did the latest flip-flip in a never-ending search for the "perfect" way to organize artists by lastname, firstname but also preserve and display the recording's original "by" name, whatever it might be. My latest system is to put lastname, firstname in Album Artist, and the true exact "by" name in Artist. I used to do it opposite, hence the flip-flop, but this prevented the true original artist name from appearing in display mode during playback, on my iPod, etc. For instance, jazz musician Benny Goodman used a bunch of different group names -- Benny Goodman Quartet, Benny Goodman Sextet, Benny Goodman & his Orchestra, etc. Whatever it is goes in the Artist field, while Album Artist is always "Goodman, Benny".

[mmlevin]

I create smartlists for the genres, which are of the form:
     [Media Type] is {audio, or video, or photos} and
     [Genre] contains {rock, or soundtrack, or whatever} and finally
     [sort by] [name a-z]

I use MC mostly for video, although I do have my audio library in there as well.  Multiple genres allows you to do things like, for example,
Smartlist "romance"
     [Media Type] is [Video]
     [Genre] contains [romance]
     [sort by] [name a-z]
(contains all videos containing genre "romance")

Smartlist "comedy"
     [Media Type] is [Video]
     [Genre] contains [comedy]
     [sort by] [name a-z]
(contains all videos containing genre "comedy")

Smartlist "romantic comedy"
     [Media Type] is [Video]
     [Genre] contains [romance]
     [Genre} contains [comedy]
     [sort by] [name a-z]
(contains all videos coded as both "romance" and "comedy")

I find this aspect of MC to be a plus, not a negative.

[gappie]

Hello

I just found  JRiver Media Center and like it a lot. However I have been using Windows Media Player before and there is one important  feature that I cant find in JRiver MC.

I have tagged many of my MP3 files with multiple genre, for example like this: Soundtrack; Rock

This way the song will show up both when I select "Soundtrack" or the "Rock" genre. But JRiver seems to create a new genre called "Soundtrack; Rock". This of course excludes this song from the other tracks that has just "Rock" as genre.

Is there or will there be any support for tags with multiple genre's?

Regards
Hans

one of the things you can do is for instance add a pane to a view and choose expression. as an expression add

Code: [Select]

[genre]&datatype=[list]now genre will behave as a list in that pane (but not for nestings). so when you have jazz;rock as a genre for a song, you will find the song back under rock and jazz.
when you use it a lot you could make a calculated library field that does the same.

hope it is a bit clear.
succes
 
gab