I've been trying to figure out how to take one of the many annual "best of" lists available on the web and quickly turn it into a smartlist that generates a listing of the albums I own so I can listen to them as a single set. For shorter lists of 10 albums, typing in the albums and/or my own memory is plenty quick, but longer lists of 50 to a 100 present a more arduous task.
Take the following sample of 20 albums from Rolling Stone's latest Top 50 of 2011 list:
20 Foo Fighters – Wasting Light
19 Eric Church – Chief
18 Feist – Metals
17 TV On The Radio – Nine Types Of Light
16 R.E.M. – Collapse Into Now
15 Cage The Elephant – Thank You Happy Birthday
14 Beastie Boys – Hot Sauce Committee Pt. 2
13 tUnE-YarDs – w h o k i l l
12 The Black Keys – El Camino
11 My Morning Jacket – Circuital
10 Robbie Robertson – How To Become Clairvoyant
09 Wild Flag – Wild Flag
08 Wilco – The Whole Love
07 The Decemberists – The King Is Dead
06 Lady Gaga – Born This Way
05 Radiohead – The King Of Limbs
04 Fleet Foxes – Helplessness Blues
03 Paul Simon – So Beautiful Or So What
02 Jay-Z & Kanye West – Watch The Throne
01 Adele – 21
Through some experimentation, MC seems to need just the artist and album using the [Artist - Album (Year)] field. And, after finally figuring out how to get the boolean expression OR working in the smartlist editor--as well as figuring out which characters the smartlist editor prefers to parse--I can now get MC to display all the albums I have from a list. It took some Excel (and Word) magic to get the right block of text to import, but it's pretty cool for what it is, IMHO, and definitely a testament to the flexibility of MC.
If you'd like to try it yourself, you can import the attached .txt file into a new smartlist. You'll probably need to *maximize* the editor to be able to see the OK button flickering at the bottom--the number of rules that are added exceed the screen size. (Maybe scrolling can be a feature request?) You also won't be able to edit anything beyond the bottom of the screen, unless your machine lets you do something mine won't.
The list removes duplicates you might have and sorts by album and track.
And a warning--depending on how quick your machine is and how large of a library you have, the smartlist will likely chug for 10-20 seconds while it computes all the logic. Of course, you can always select all the results and send them to a static, non-smartlist playlist for faster loading (which is what I did).
Might have to get the Excel spreadsheet into more of a form so I can do this more quickly next time around for other lists. Could be addicting!
Anyone else tried this sort of thing? I'd be curious to hear what your method was. Now that I know how to do it, I think it takes about 5-10 minutes starting from a basic list of album and artist. Adjusting varying formats for how MC likes to read this is what takes time.
P