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[Gl3nn]

I've started trying to use a relational field for "Artist Rating" in order to easily come up with a "Favorite Artist" rating/ranking system. 

Mostly, for single artists, this works well.  The trouble, as you can imagine, is with multiple artists... and with many of the 40s music where orchestras and featured vocalists are introduced.  I currently have these tagged in the [Artist] field.

I don't suppose there's a way to use [Album Artist] instead of [Artist] as the relational field?  I mean... use it as the trigger for storing 1 value for the created field in question?

If not, has anyone out there created some kind of artist ranking field which can deal with the issue of multiple artists?  Or can suggest some other way of storing/displaying the other artists other than in the [Artist] field?

[Gl3nn]

Can anyone at least tell me what "store one value for each artist" is based on?  Similar to "one value for each album" being [Album Artist(auto)] & [Album]?

I'm getting inconsistent and inaccurate results.

Like I said, I've created a field "Artist Rating" and limited it to A,B or C.  I pick a song by Led Zeppelin, select "B", and all the Led Zeppelin songs are tagged as such... plus 2 Frank Sinatra songs!

I'm not making this up... it's a simple as that... and I'm about as careful as I can be.

A little help would be greatly appreciated.

[rick.ca]

Artist-related fields relate to [Artist] only; this can't be changed. [Artist] can now be made a list-type field so it can handle multiple artists properly. I haven't done this myself, so I'm not sure, but I think if you do so artist-related fields will relate to the first artist in the list only. If [Artist] is a string-type field but includes a delimited list of multiple artists, I would expect artist-related fields to relate to the exact same string only.

It seems to me using artist-related fields with a list-type [Artist] should work fine—to the extent the first artist can be considered the "lead," and it's logical that the related fields relate only to that artist. If that is not the case (e.g., Artist1 and Artist2 are rated 'B', but together you would want to rate them 'A'), you have two choices: Make a new single artist (e.g., 'Artist1 & Artist2'), or introduce a separate non-related field for rating multiple artist works (i.e., used to override the other rating).

I have no idea how your "Led Zeppelin featuring Frank Sinatra" tracks fit into this.

[Gl3nn]

Thanks for the reply, Rick.

I'm going to have to review all my artist tags a little more before I attempt the switch from string to list.  I'm not sure I want to tackle the work (and risk) right now.

Honestly, the unpredictable behavior I came across yesterday has me more than a little spooked about using this at all. 

I had been using your "filters" concept in library views, which you were good enough to share a few months ago, but the list in some cases was getting long, and I just thought that using an "artist rating" might be a good substitute... and it might be, even with the complication of duets and such... but I just can't live with random and incorrect entries creeping in.  I'd report this as a bug but with the development focus being so video/tv oriented, I doubt if I would get a response.

Thanks again for your time!

[Matt]

Rick gave good advice.

Just to clarify, Artist is always a list-type field (it's optional whether you ever put more than one item in the list).

Relational artist fields relate to the first artist only.

[rick.ca]

Honestly, the unpredictable behavior I came across yesterday has me more than a little spooked about using this at all. 

FWIW, I use a number of related fields, and while I do see strange things from time-to-time, they don't seem to be of much consequence. I don't know if I've corrected all errors as they happened or if they're somehow self-correcting, but I can't find any now. I have no related items with more than one value (e.g., only a few Frank Sinatra tracks getting Led Zeppelin's artist rating). I don't recall any case where all the all the values were changed to something for a different related item (e.g., all of Frank Sinatra's tracks being changed). I appreciate that would be very difficult to spot for something like an album rating, but I think I would have noticed if things like country or biography were being set incorrectly.

[javidan]

I'm going to have to review all my artist tags a little more before I attempt the switch from string to list.  I'm not sure I want to tackle the work (and risk) right now.

Hi Crescent,

Personally, I try avoid making the "Artist" tag a list. It causes a lot of "incompatibility" (for the lack of a better term) when I use related fields.

Where there is more than one Artist involved, especially when a "featuring..." is there, I have an additional field called "Artist - Guest". This tag will not be seen in any other mp3 player (e.g. Your iPod etc) but that is a compromise I am willing to live with since I use J River for any serious listening and searching.

Of course, this is in-avoidable for me right now when you have a duet sung by two Artists, I can't possibly put one as a priority over the other.

Stick with the easy ones to test out your requirements and you won't have too much trouble expanding your needs to your more complicated ones later.

J River is so...disgustingly...powerful. *laugh*

[Gl3nn]

Thank you all for your additional comments, I appreciate it.

I'm going to keep (slowly) plugging away at this with the "easy" artists and see if I can spot/report further anomalies.  I may try to recreate the Zeppelin/Sinatra blip as a start.

Otherwise, I thought about adding an additional "featured artists" tag as you suggest, javidan.  Or I might have to populate some other fields, like [Orchestra], [Band], etc. which I've avoided.  It gets complicated and I haven't spent enough time thinking it out.

[rick.ca]

I'm going to keep (slowly) plugging away at this with the "easy" artists and see if I can spot/report further anomalies.

There are two possible types of anomalies. First, the related field has different values for files related to the same item (e.g. a few Frank Sinatra tracks having [Artist Rating] set to that of Led Zeppelin). These can be found by a smartlist...

~nodup=[Artist Rating] ~dup=[Artist]

Second, the related field has the same value for all files, but they've somehow been set to the incorrect value (e.g., all Frank Sinatra files have the same [Artist Rating], but it's been set to that of Led Zeppelin). There's no obvious systematic way to look for these, but in most cases they're going to stick out like a sore thumb.

[Gl3nn]

Thanks again Rick.  I'll look at it again 1st thing tomorrow.

It's slowly sinking-in.