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[rjm]

I have a smartlist for favorite artists that currently selects about 100 of the 10,000 artists in my library.

To edit the smartlist, I right click the smartlist, select Edit, and use the standard edit dialogue. Editing in this manner is not very convenient because of the large number (10,000) of items in the list. And because the 100 selected artists, while they do sort to the top of the 10,000 item list, are not alphabetically sorted themselves and appear to sort by the order they were added to the list.

I'm wondering if anyone can suggest a more convenient method for editing. For example, I would like a view that filters all media rated 5 stars in which I could select an author and add it to the Favorite Artists smartlist in a convenient manner.

Someone showed me how to add playlists to panes which is a wonderful way to edit playlists. I'm looking for a smartlist analog.

[marko]

It might be easier to create a new library field, perhaps call it Favourites, possibly make it relational to Artist, then, for your favourite artists, populate the field with something, anything, so long as it makes the field 'not empty'

Next, go back to your smartlist, and change the rule to include: -[Favourites]=[] and I'm sure you can see what this will do. Now, you just know that anytime you populate the [Favourite] field for a given [artist], it will show up in your smartlist without the need for any further list editing. (if you set it to be relational, all that artist's work should appear in the smartlist, including any stuff from that artist that you import at a later date.

What do you think, workable?

-marko

[rjm]

Thanks. 

Sounds promising if I can get the relational thing to work. The whole idea is to flag an artist once, and then be confident that anything else by him I add to my library will show up in the work by favorite artists view.

I have no experience with the relational feature. Will play around.

[Alex B]

A relational field will work fine.

You could try a relational "five stars" field. Then you could also rate the artists with a single click (this works in list views). Perhaps not all artists in your library are equally favorite. Even if you have no use for an "artist rating" now it might become useful later. For now, you can simply give all favorite artists the same rating and create a smartlist that excludes the files with empty values (the possible values for an "edit type: five stars" field are empty, 1, 2, 3 , 4 and 5).

In the attached screenshot I clicked a star only in one file and all tracks from the same artist got the same artist rating value.


Log in to the forum if you can't see the attachments.

[rjm]

That looks really promising. I'll try it thanks.

[rjm]

Wow, this works remarkably well. Thanks for the tips.

For anyone reading this thread I would like to point out how smartlists can improve the maintainability of your view designs.

My library has about 50 custom views, most of which provide the ability to filter on favorite artists. I designed these filters to use the smartlist Favorite Artists.

Now, thanks to the above tips, I am completely changing how I designate a favorite artist, however, rather than having to painfully edit each of 50 views, I simply need to change one smartlist.

Smartlists are like subroutines that provide a layer of hierarchy and thus maintainability to your view designs.