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[ElQuia]

Hi guys, I would like to use library or whatever to build some statistics on my music collection, for example: how may total hours of music do I have?, how may hours of jazz or pop for example?

Can it be done?
Where can I find the info on how to do it?

Keep on the EXCELLENT work! :-)

[rick.ca]

Using a Categories view (Customize View...) with a Details list style (view drop-down menu), you can create something like this...

[zxsix]

A quick and dirty way would be to highlight the songs in a certain genre.
Then at the bottom of the window you'll get a total count of how many files are in your selection, total size of those files, and total playlength of those files if you were to play them non-stop.

There isn't a reporting feature per se...
You could probably build a viewscheme that lays the info out in a way that you want to see it and then print it.

I've also heard of a SQL plugin in the 3rd party plugins forum.
If you know SQL and have Crystal Reports or similar, you could write a report that selects and groups the data.

[ElQuia]

zxsix  sadly I dont know anything about sql ...

rick.ca: is there any templates or something I can download to do this? any wiki or manual with instructions? .... The thing is I am talking about more or less 400 gb of music, mostly flac, but some mp3 also ... so it is quite a lot of info...

thanks to both for your replies 

 ... it would be nice if a easy feature could be added to mc 15 to give it an easy ability to generate these kind of reports ...

[rick.ca]

But I put all the instructions you need in one sentence, and included a picture!

We could exchange a template, but it would be more work for both of us than you just configuring the view the way you want it—which is what you're going to want to do anyway. If you're concerned about messing up an existing view, create a new one using View - Add View - Add Library View. You'll get a good start by selecting the provided Genres template. From the drop-down menu on the header bar, change the List Style to Details. At this point, you should recognize the screen shot I provided. Just right-click on the column header and add whatever fields you want summarized. If you want to group by a category other than genre (e.g., the example I provided is by Style), select Customize View and add the category.

To realize the full benefit of MC's powerful database capabilities, it's necessary to learn how to create and configure view schemes. They're so flexible, you'll quickly realize the real challenge is deciding what you want, not how to configure it. To illustrate with the question at hand... Hopefully, I've explained this well enough you'll be able to see how you can create a "Statistics View." But where you go from there is a matter of personal preference. If you really like statistics, you may want to have a view dedicated to that purpose alone. At each category (i.e., genre, style, year, artist, album), it would show the statistics for that level. On the other hand, you may be happy with just the statistics at the genre level, and decide to incorporate that into your primary view. In other words, you would use a details style for the genre category so it would show these statistics, and use a thumbnails style for other categories.

My personal preference for a primary view is a "Panes and Details" view. It precludes the display of statistics in the manner described, but it's much more powerful than a "Categories" view for selecting files based on multiple categories. In the information bar at the bottom of the screen, however, it shows the number of files matching the selected categories and their total playing time. That's quite useful for getting that information for any cross-section of the collection. For example, in seconds I can see how many "album-rock tracks from the 70's" are in my collection.