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[AudioBorg]

I must say that although I absolutely LOVE MC - I do get a bit overwhelmed with it's power and flexibility. I'm sure what I want to do is not too difficult but I'll be damned if I can understand how to do it.

I have all my full (complete) albums imported into my main MC library, complete with hi-res cover art and what I would call "standard" tag data for which I used Tag and Rename to update. The library looks great in the MC standard views and I am very pleased.

The issue: I also have a whole bunch of 'singles' for which I did not want the entire album for one reason or another. I really don't want to clutter up the screen with a boatload of artists/albums that are not full albums and would rather figure out a way to organize all of my singles into a group(s) of some sort so that they display as a single album and/or artist. I'm sure that MC can do this - anyone out have any experience or able to help?

Custom tags, fields, views, etc. Oye vey my head is spinning.

Thank You!

[vagskal]

You have a lot of options with MC. To get you started I can just tell you how I do it.

Singles by (album) artists that I also have proper albums by I tag with Genre: Single (mostly because this works with another program I use for playback) and append [Single] to the album name. That way I can easily filter out the singles from a view that displays albums (Customize View => Set rules for file display...) if I want. In views where I can see all albums by an (album) artist I like to see the singles as well (with nice single cover art) so I do not filter those views.

For singles by artists I do not have proper albums by ("one hit wonders") I have a special "Album" called Various Singles with a cover art for the "Album" that I find appropriate (saved to a dummy file with that cover art embedded and its Track # set to 0 to sort first, which makes that cover art appear for the "album" in standard views but unfortunately not always in theatre view/JRemote) and a fictive date for the "Album". The singles files I tag with Album: Various Singles and add the actual release year to a custom field. I have embedded singles cover art in each file and tag the files with Genre: Single. One downside of this is when you have multiple tracks on one single (Track # 1, the A side, and Track # 2, the B side) since they do not sort together because a view displaying album is best sorted on the album level by Disc # and Track #.

I also have special views where I limit the display to songs with Genre: Single. To get that view sorted by release date I have made a custom calculated field to sort by that will get the actual release year info for singles in the Various Singles "Album".

[MrC]

I posted about this recently, but I've utterly failed to find the post.

There are several ways to handle this, two easy options are:

1) use the auto-filled [Album Type] field to indicate if a track comes from a complete album.  This works well generally, but will miss a few cases, which should be pretty clear from reading the linked description.

2) create your own field to be used (or use the [Keyword] field) to indicate that the tagged tracks should not be presented in typical views, or should be presented as a single group.  You can customize existing views, or create your own, both pretty easy tasks.  You'd tag your single tracks so that the view could present them as desired.

Would either of these ways work for you?  Also, what types of views do you generally like (panes, categories)?

[AudioBorg]

Thanks guys for the replies. Some more information/updates.

I did stumble on the 'Complete Album' tag and thought I was home free - except for the condition "have at least 2 files or 10 minutes of audio" which I don't think would work quite right as I do have several cases where this is true but I still treat as 'singles' not complete albums.

My favorite view is the stock MC 'Artists' view. I like the look of the cover art on the TV. Any Panes view is sort of difficult to read from my viewing distance.

I have tried something similar to the techniques that vagskal outlined in which I filled in the 'Album Artist" field with "Singles". This showed up as a single artist which when I clicked on 'albums' (in MC Artist view) 'fanned out' to show all of the unique albums but w/o the unique artist information. Which makes sense as I forced the 'artist' in my implementation to be 'singles' it's just not very readable in the list in the lower half of the screen.

[Vocalpoint]

The issue: I also have a whole bunch of 'singles' for which I did not want the entire album for one reason or another. I really don't want to clutter up the screen with a boatload of artists/albums that are not full albums and would rather figure out a way to organize all of my singles into a group(s) of some sort so that they display as a single album and/or artist. I'm sure that MC can do this - anyone out have any experience or able to help?

Hey - I am doing this very thing over the past few weeks. For all these single tracks - I am assembling them in custom "Various Artist" albums that feature a specific year (or timeframe) with roughly an hour worth of music, a custom cover (done in Photoshop) plus the usual array of my favorite tagging stuff. I fill the Comment tag with the string "From The Album "Blah Blah Blah" to ensure I know what album it was from. I tag all chart positions and peak data as well.

Note: The key is filling Album Artist with "Various Artists" to keep everything nicely grouped.

For my main library - any given album is either "complete" or it's not. So the artist was a one hit wonder or a specific album only had two tracks that matter - or it's a special mix of a given track - they are a perfect candidate for the above.

So far I have about 300 extraneous tracks that will get the Various Artists treatment over the next few weeks. I have made up some wicked radio promo type covers in Photoshop and the couple I have done so far look and feel like they came from a record company back in the day.

What's really cool is selecting something called Billboard Modern Rock Tracks 1990-1991 and be able to enjoy all these obscuro tracks back to back - assembled like this.

VP

[AudioBorg]

Vocalpoint - Just curious - why are you  using customized cover art - why not the original cover for the album from which the track came? I too, have several hundred tracks that are not part of 'complete' albums but I have tagged them with the original artist, album, year, genre and album cover art. The only thing different I have done is set all of the track number to '01' - which I may change to '00' - and set the 'Album Artist' tag to 'Singles'. I used 'singles' mainly to differentiate it from the built in MC "Various Artists" tagging. I may change this to be more flexible and allow further grouping of singles tracks. Still learning . . . 

BTW, I'm not criticizing your approach, just trying to understand your rationale. I am learning with this exercise that there are a crapload of ways to accomplish this with MC - many people seem to tackle it sightly differently.

[Vocalpoint]

Vocalpoint - Just curious - why are you  using customized cover art - why not the original cover for the album from which the track came?

Good Q:

This latest foray (custom stuff) is really my best solution to a problem that popped up after weeks of sorting. Follow me thru as I explain....

For the last 6-12 months - I have been devoting an extraordinary amount of time to tagging, cataloging and archiving (on three sets of drives) my entire digital lossless library. My plan is to have every track consolidated down to it's original album release, in it's original release form, mastering and so on. Whilst I was dealing with the major sorting - I came upon several binders full of data DVDs that I burned back in 2007-2008. On these discs were tons of single tracks (all in FLAC) with no real center or purpose - all scattered thru time with wide swings in metadata.

So - after going thru some 30-40 DVDs and copying out every file - I then went thru the entire folder of tracks and ditched out any dupes that were already represented in the main library. When I finished this massive sorting exercise - I found I had about 300-350 tracks with no home. Like I mentioned - deep album cuts, singles, remixes, weird crap from years ago.

So - what to do? Do I go "all in" and do my usual obsessive metadata session per cut - including album art...or do I set these up as rough "collections" having something in common with the other weirdness discovered. First off - I decided to go all in on metadata for each cut - they all have to be fully tagged to work with my playlists, smartlists, lookups etc but I did decided to compromise with the art. For 300-350 separate tracks - many that are very obscure - finding suitable album art is not always guaranteed or possible. Then there's the work involved prepping said art - when it can be found. I am a huge stickler for my album art and have been known to "obsess" a little over finer details. Doing 300 art sessions for 300 single tracks - probably not going to happen.

But once I got one custom collection going with a single custom art cover - it was great and easy to find in MC. Like you - I rely on views - and my most used is a view called Recent Albums - which really represents the last 60 days of imports to the main library. And nothing annoys me more than album "stragglers" in the library that have a single track or a couple of tracks - I decided to slip in a custom cover for all tracks and then it appears nicely as a single "album" in this view.

Once done - it's cool, it's easy to find and easy to play in a single session. Most importantly - it lets me get these obscurities back into rotation without worrying too much about all the minutiae that I usually devote to a full album tagging session.  

However - if I happen to stumble onto a scanned 45 picture sleeve or something decent that can be used for art - I might slip one in here and there but in general - I am jazzed about these custom covers. I wanted mine to look unique and have a feel like radio promo releases (I have a long history in music and in broadcast) so these comps "look" like something I may have had on my desk in 1987. Weird I know - but fun just the same.

Cheers!

VP

[AudioBorg]

Weird? Hell no!! Makes perfect sense, quite frankly. And I truly appreciate the detailed explanation. I am sure that I have (or will have) some tracks that fall into the category you mention. Care to part with any of that custom cover art?? 

Anyhow, glad to see that I am not the only one to suffer a bit of OCD when it comes to this stuff. I spent this past Saturday and Sunday, 10-12 hours each day, tagging my FLAC collection for consistency and completeness - or at least complete for me! My wife thinks I'm nuts.

BTW, do you know any other good cover art sources other than the Album Art Exchange?

[rick.ca]

BTW, do you know any other good cover art sources other than the Album Art Exchange?

That's my first stop. If there's nothing there, I use Album Art Downloader.