Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Klaus_K]

Hi,

I have a question for my fellow classical music lovers on the board...

How do you maintain "roles" for artists? I have set up a list field for soloists, where I put instrumentalists and singers. Now I was thinking about categorizing these soloists further. For instrumentalists I could add a suffix with the instrument after the name (like: Alfred Brendel (pn) or something like that). Now when it comes to operas I'd like to record the connection between a soloist and the role performed in that specific recording.

How do you deal with that? Or do you just ignore it? I spend a lot of time getting the information from my physical recordings into JRiver but I have no idea how to bring this info into the system, apart from using a comment field with the plain text of the lineup - but that would duplicate the soloists and I don't like duplicates in my database 

Thanks for any advice

Klaus

[Jaguu]

My solution goes as follows using a nested list (by the way soloist is a standard MC field):

Cello\Soloist1
Cello\Soloist2
Cello\Soloist3
Cembalo\Soloist4
Cembalo\Soloist5
Flute\Soloist6
Flute\Soloist7
...
...
Voice\Bass\Name 1
Voice\Bass\Name 2
Voice\Soprano\Name 3
Voice\Tenor\Name 4
...
Groups\Dresdner Kammersolisten

In this way you can select an instrument an see all the soloists playing it, the same with voices. I use groups for the rare cases where a group of soloists is named without specifying individual names. I also have a customized view that starts with soloists in the panes.

[Klaus_K]

I'm an absolute noob when it comes to nested fields. How does that work? You have a custom field called instrument? (Or is that also a standard field?)

I guess that would not work for roles in an opera, where a given soloist could ve assigned to different roles on different albums?

Thanks
Klaus

[Jaguu]

I think, but I am not sure, that only fields of type "list" can be nested. Just enter the tag information like this: AAA\BBB\CCC\DDD\EEE. You can nest as many levels you want, so you could have:

Voice\Soprano\Maria Callas\Role1
Voice\Soprano\Maria Callas\Role2
Voice\Soprano\Maria Callas\Role3

If you customized your view with panes you will get a tree list of the nested tags. So if you select Role3 you will get all the operas where Maria Callas performed Role3. As I have only a few opera in my libraries, I do not specifiy the role of a singer in an opera.

Take the field "soloists" as it is a list field. The field "instrument" is a string field. You can only add one instrument, which does not make much sense. I proposed once to make this field also a list field, but it never happened. But if you get it how to nest fields, then you can create your own schemes that work for you. You can also create your own list type fields.

[vagskal]

So if you select Role3 you will get all the operas where Maria Callas performed Role3.

I am by no means an expert when it comes to nested fields. Tagging the field the suggested way - which is good advice - you will (I am pretty sure) get all recordings where Maria Callas played that role in that particular opera (in various recordings that you have and tagged).

To be able to see all the different sopranos that have preformed this roll in the opera in the recordings you have, you will have to use another list type field with another order of the list items (the stuff between the "\"s), i.e. for instance Name of Opera\Voice\Soprano\Role1\Maria Callas etc. Should MC come to support support global search and substitution when using a so called regular expression (regex(...)) such switching of the order of list items on the fly would be easy, but I think it can be achieved also today using the ListItem(...) MC function. It all depends on what is important to you (in this case the artist/performer or the role in the opera, or both - in which case you will have to do a lot of extra typing or learn to use the powerful expressions in MC if you do not know them already).

In any case you need a field that is of list type. The stock People field is such a field. Unfortunately this field is not compatible with the "standard" ID3v2.3 tag IPLS (Involved People List). You can use the People stock field or create a custom field that ends with

Code: [Select]

&datatype=[list]

[Klaus_K]

I think, but I am not sure, that only fields of type "list" can be nested. Just enter the tag information like this: AAA\BBB\CCC\DDD\EEE. You can nest as many levels you want, so you could have:

Voice\Soprano\Maria Callas\Role1
Voice\Soprano\Maria Callas\Role2
Voice\Soprano\Maria Callas\Role3

If you customized your view with panes you will get a tree list of the nested tags. So if you select Role3 you will get all the operas where Maria Callas performed Role3. As I have only a few opera in my libraries, I do not specifiy the role of a singer in an opera.

Thanks for the advice. I played around a little bit yesterday night and it works as you described. However, it seems that the only way to get there is by manually updating every soloist with a string that includes the backslash, right? I hoped to find a possibility to do this via pane tagging, but that seems not to be possible.
I have two list type fields (Soloist and Role) - my problem is how to manage to assign a Role to a single soloist via pane tagging, when the album has other soloists? Maybe I need to set-up my view differently, but when I tried I always assigned the role to all other soloists when trying to use pane tagging... I know it's difficult to describe with words - I try to catch a screenshot.

Thanks anyway
Klaus

[vagskal]

The best way to nest is usually to use an expression for inserting the backslash between different fields. Make an expression pane with this simple example just to see how it works:

Code: [Select]

[Album Artist (auto)]\[Year] - [Album]&datatype=[list]
In your case where one track can have several soloists with different roles I think the only practical way is to have just one list type field with the backslashes in it (Maria Callas\Role1; Some Other Soloist\Role2) and that will unfortunately prevent you from doing pane tagging (since the pane will be nested). MC is not a relational database.