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[texaganian]

I wanted to create a SmartList which would return all songs that I have cover versions from more than one artist. The list should return only one version of the song from each artist.

Didn't seem too hard and my original try at it seemed to work. The smartlist definition looked like this:

      ([Media Type]=[Audio] ~dup=[Name] ~sort=[Name],[Artist]) ~limit=-1,1,[Artist]

This appeared to work but it also showed songs where I have multiple versions but only by one artist. So I added a second Dup clause to filter those out, like this:

      (([Media Type]=[Audio] ~dup=[Name] ~sort=[Name],[Artist]) ~dup=[Name])) ~limit=-1,1,[Artist]

Again it appeared to work until I looked at the results closely. For some (but, curiously, not all) songs it doesn't return everything.

Take, for instance, "Amazing Grace". If I search "Audio" for name="Amazing Grace", I get 15 tracks from 13 artists.

But when I use the SmartList definition above it only returns seven of those tracks. If I remove the "~limit=-1,1,[Artist]" clause it returns all the tracks but doesn't do what I want.

Now here's the REALLY weird part. If I restore the "~limit=-1,1,[Artist]" clause and ADD a [name]="Amazing Grace" clause at the front, like so:

      (([name]="Amazing Grace" [Media Type]=[Audio] ~dup=[Name] ~sort=[Name],[Artist]) ~dup=[Name]) ~limit=-1,1,[Artist]

it returns exactly what it should, 13 tracks from 13 different artists (but obviously is no longer a general purpose solution)!

Anybody have any idea what is going on?

[marko]

Complicated one for a Monday morning...

Let's see...
This get's you all the cover versions, plus the original...
[Media Type]=[Audio] ~nodup=[Name],[artist] ~dup=[name] ~sort=[Name],[Artist]

BUT... (isn't there always)
It does not, and cannot, take into account the two versions of "All Around The World" shown in the screenshot below:

Obviously, the Oasis track and the Lisa Stansfield track are seperate tracks in their own right and are not wanted in this list.
There really is no way to exclude them either, which brings me to the next potential problem...

A cover is one artists interpretation of anothers, original, work.
You say that you want just one version of each track in your list, but it strikes me, that if the purpose of the list is to show cover versions, then you wouldn't really want the original version to be in the list either, and as it stands, if there are two tracks, an original and a cover, you have a 50-50 shot of the whether you get the original or the cover in the final list.
If you understand that and don't mind, fine, otherwise, you are going to have to work out a way to tag covers, as covers, and then incorporate that into your search string.

Now, for the next part, I may have grabbed the wrong end of the stick, but my understanding is that you only want one track of all the duplicates listed, and at the moment at least, you don't mind if that just happens to be the original version.
Going about it by limiting the artist to just one of each in the final list means that if you have different tracks covered by the same artist, for instance, I have a Bryan Ferry album here that consists entirely of Dylan covers, if any one of these appear in the list, then any other artists work that Bryan Ferry may have covered would be excluded because you have stated "limit to just one artist"
If you use the [name] field instead, then you get one version of each track, bearing in mind that you could still have tracks that share the same name, but are not covers, and also, you could have the original track, not the cover, in the final list:
[Media Type]=[Audio] ~nodup=[Name],[artist] ~sort=[Name],[Artist] ~dup=[name] ~limit=-1,1,[name]




Ever wish you hadn't started something?

-marko.

[texaganian]

Outstanding reply, Marko! Thanks.

Yes, I know my terminology is imprecise but your smartlist definition actually gives exactly what I want... one version per artist of each song that I have by more than one artist (and, yes, there are some false positives caused by different songs with the same title but that's ok for my purposes).

Thank you much, sir!