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[MartinBar]

 I am trying to design how albums are grouped so that I have "Popular" music albums grouped by Artist and "Classical" music albums grouped by Composer.
For "Popular" music I have filtered the Genre to include Pop, Rock, Jazz and so on and grouped by Album Artist (auto) and this works just fine with compilations showing under "Various Artists".

I would like to do the same for Classical Genre but there is no equivalent of Album Composer - with or without (auto) so I am scratching my head . ?

Is there some way of achieving this

[MrC]

Create different views, modify and use the existing ones for popular music (adding a rule to filter [genre] is not Classical) and Classical music.  In the Classic music views, customize away.

Also, you can use a calculated user field as the basis of your Group By.  It would check the values of Composer and/or Genre, and when not classical, return Album Artist (auto), otherwise Composer.  This will then group as you want.

[MartinBar]

Thanks for the quick reply.  

I am new the J River so not familiar with user calculated fields. ?

Can I have an expression such that if all tracks in an album have the same composer it returns the composer's name otherwise returns "Various Composers" and if yes what functions would I use to do this?

thanks

[MrC]

There are a couple ways you could do this.  

One is to create your own Album Composer field.  You could manually tag this field to be the value you like.

Another approach uses a technique which I'll mention, but is more than I want to expose you to.  Being a new user,  it will frighten you. :-)  It uses an expression with global variables to calculate a value for an Album Composer field.

So I'll first suggest ignoring your immediate goal of having an Album Composer, and instead, try a more complete Panes view that shows you Album, Artist, Composer, etc.  (see attached image).  The view filters in both directions so you can select an album or composer, and broaden or narrow your results.  If you've selected an album, the Composers column will show the one or more composers relevant to that album.

Would something like this work for you?

[MartinBar]

Thanks again for the quick reply.

I want to use "Album Composer" as a DNLA grouping as well as directly so I think I need to bite the bullet and use a calculated field.

I am a now retired but worked in IT for nearly 40 years so I am happy to give it a go    - just need some pointers as to which functions to use.

thanks

[MrC]

If you mean you want to dive in and use the global variable technique, then you'll want to read the three links referenced at the end of the Save() function.

    http://wiki.jriver.com/index.php/Media_Center_expression_language#Save.28....29:_Saves_a_value_to_a_global_variable

[MartinBar]

Thanks

I will give this ago but I am struggling to understand the syntax.

In the track count example the syntax is

[=save(0,v_tracks[album artist (auto)][album])1]=1 [=save(math(1+load(v_tracks[album artist (auto)][album])),v_tracks[album artist (auto)][album])1]=1

What I do not understand is why the first expression does always set v_tracks[album artist (auto)][album] to 0 for each track so that the second expression would set it to 1?

thanks

Martin

[Vincent Kars]

There are many ways to tag classical.
Just some suggestions.

In the file system I made a dir C:\Music\Classical
As you might have guessed, all classical is in this sub-dir.
The advantage is that you can use a simple rule in a view like
File name starts with  C:\Music\Classical
The advantage is that you don’t have to rely on the genre tag
You can populate it the way you want without having to adept the view each time you add a new value.

BTW: JRiver has some powerful options to move files.

For composers I use the Composer tag.
It is a standard tag and although a lot of media players don’t use it, support is improving. It is even supported on my smart phone.

Albums is the problem. Often works are combined e.g. 1 violin concert by Prokofiev and by Shostakovich. I solved this by creating a custom tag “Work” but as this is a non-standard tag support on other players (and DLNA) might be a problem.

An alternative is to create a custom tag Album-Original.
Copy the album tag to it so you preserve this information.
Then split the Album into compositions.
A bit more detail can be found here: http://www.thewelltemperedcomputer.com/SW/Players/JRiver/Classical.htm

[MrC]

I will give this ago but I am struggling to understand the syntax.

In the track count example the syntax is

[=save(0,v_tracks[album artist (auto)][album])1]=1 [=save(math(1+load(v_tracks[album artist (auto)][album])),v_tracks[album artist (auto)][album])1]=1

What I do not understand is why the first expression does always set v_tracks[album artist (auto)][album] to 0 for each track so that the second expression would set it to 1?

It has to do with how MC runs the filtering rules.   This explains why:

   http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=72049.msg518660#msg518660

Did I mentioned yet I didn't want to scare you ? :-)

[kstuart]

A bit more detail can be found here: http://www.thewelltemperedcomputer.com/SW/Players/JRiver/Classical.htm

Vincent, that's exactly the sort of thing I was looking for.

I don't think that each individual user of JRiver is trying to do a thousand different things, but rather are trying to do a few common things (such as use JRiver for classical rather than popular music - or both).

By the way, which "skin" are using in the JRiver pictures on that web page ?

[AndyV]

My music collection is predominantly classical, and there are many subtle issues involved in getting a satisfying scheme. One sneaky little problem to bear in mind is that there are some cds of a single work by a single composer that nonetheless contain tracks by other composers. For example William Christies "Vespro della Beata Vergine" by Monteverdi has a couple of sonatas by Giovanni Cima mixed in with the main performance as (Christie argues) might have been common at the time.  If you leave "Cima" as the composer of those tracks, then when you do any kind of view by composer, they will be missing from the Monteverdi section, so you won't get the performance that Christie wanted you to hear. Of course you can cheat and pretend that the composer of these tracks was Monteverdi, but that would be lying to a database, and that is the road to damnation. (for one day you might want to find everything that Cima composed). You can get similar issues with applause tracks. So you need some construct like "Effective Composer" perhaps implemented with a library field.  Then there are recitals ..  MC is the only show in town for addressing these issue imo.