So for example, part of our fake Big Bro album:
| Track# | Artist | Name | AlbumArtists | SongArtists | CoverArtists | Aliases | AllArtists | | ------ | ------ | ---- | ------------ | ----------- | ------------ | ------- | ---------- | | 1 | Joplin, Janis | Turtle Blues | Big Bro.. | | | Joplin, Janis | Big Bro..;Joplin, Janis | | 2 | Joplin, Janis | Summertime | Big Bro.. | | | Joplin, Janis | Big Bro..;Joplin, Janis | | 3 | Joplin, Janis | Pickle Song, feat Arlo.. | Big Bro | Guthrie, Arlo | | Joplin, Janis | Big Bro..;Joplin, Janis; Guthrie, Arlo | | 4 | Joplin, Janis | Ball & Chain | Big Bro.. | | | Joplin, Janis | Big Bro..;Joplin, Janis |
Now everything on my IPOD comes up under Joplin, Janis, making it easy to find. In MC, though, I can find these songs in many ways:
In the view pane 'Artists' I can find all of the 'Big Brother' albums by looking under 'Big Brother'
The best part, though, for me is that in the view pane 'All Artists', I can find all of these songs by looking under either 'Joplin, Janis' OR 'Big Bro..'
If I wanted to find them under 'Pearl', I'd just add 'Pearl' to the Aliases tag. Also, when I select 'Guthrie, Arlo', in addition to showing me his solo albums,
this track will also appear there (or the entire album if you want).
This is not as much extra work as it seems - it usually only involves using 'move/copy fields' (from the popup menu\Library Tools) to copy from [Artist] to [AlbumArtists].
Most of the time that's it. Then if there are any aliases I want to add, I just select the entire album, type them into [Aliases] and they auto-fill in. The only real
time-consumer is when extra artists are involved, figuring out where and how to list them. For me, the benefits of being able to find my music in any number of ways makes
it well worth it.
the name is... 111 John Travolta - Greased Lightnin' and artist says decades and album says Wow that was the 70's
Well thats wrong according to proper taggin the name should be Greased Lightnin', artist should be john travolta, and album should be Decades 50's,60's,70's, 80's, 90,s wow that was the 70's cd1
is there any way to fix all of these files by batching them? Take out the 101-700 etc...
Regarding editing columns of songs, and replacing/adding information,
For adding 'newtext' at the beginning/end of a field, you can select the whole column, enter '=newtext[fieldname]' or '=[fieldname]newtext'and it will
auto-fill. For example, all of my mix-albums are named '[MA] TheRealAlbumName'. After I import a CD - "Hits of the 70's" for instance - I click anywhere
on the 'Album' column, press Ctrl-A to highlight all of the songs, then press F2 to edit. I then type '=[MA] [Album]' and press enter. MC automatically
prepends '[MC] ' to every entry.
Track# Album
----- -----
1 "Hits of.."
2 "Hits of.."
3 "Hits of.."
after entering '=[MA] [Album]'
becomes
Track# Album
----- -----
1 "[MA] Hits of.."
2 "[MA] Hits of.."
3 "[MA] Hits of.."
In the middle of a field, you can use the Mid() expression, ie =Mid([Album], 3, 2) returns 2 characters from the 'Album' field, starting at the 3rd character.
Most of the time, what I need to do is remove text from either the beginning or end of a field. If I wanted to remove the '[MA] ' prefix from all of my albums,
I would select/edit them as above, then enter '=Mid([Album], 4, -1)' where '-1' tells MC you want it to fetch ALL of the remaining characters. You can also
combine these. For instance,
Track# Album
----- -----
1 "Hits of the 70's"
2 "Hits of the 70's"
3 "Hits of the 70's"
after entering '=[MA] Mid([Album],1,3)Mid([Album],7,-1)'
becomes
Track# Album
----- -----
1 "[MA] its the 70's"
2 "[MA] its the 70's"
3 "[MA] its the 70's"
Because I do this so often, I've created some auto-calculated fields to make this easier (Options \ Library & Folders \ Manage Library Fields).
Each field is nothing more than a shorthand for using the Mid() expression in a particular field.
For me, I'm usually removing text from the beginning of either the [Name], [Album], or [Artist] field, so that's what they all do - they all remove text
from the beginning of one of these fields. They're named according to the field they edit:
'n1','n2','n3'... (for the name field) 'al1', 'al2', 'al3'... (for the album field) and 'ar1', 'ar2', 'ar3'... (for 'artist'). The digit tells me how
many characters will be removed (I use 1 through 5).
The 'al4' field, for instance, removes the first 4 characters from the [Album] field.
It's just a user-created field that contains the expression '=Mid([Album],4,-1)'
The 'n2' field corresponds to the expression '=Mid([Name],2,-1), 'ar2'- 2 chars from [Artist], and so on...
The advantage here is speed. Now that I've created these fields, I can use them to type fewer characters.
In the example here - removing the prefixed '[MA] ' from my 'Album' field, I highlight everything, press F2 to edit, then type
'=[al5]' I get the same result as if I'd typed
'=Mid([Album],5,-1)'
it's only a few characters, but going through a whole library it makes a big difference.
Hope that makes sense and helps some  |
