Print

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

[Stopeter44]

I've figured out how to sort on last name, etc. within MC 18

What I want now is to have albums like "Love, Devotion & Surrender" by Carlos Santana & John McLaughlin, to show up under Carlos Santana & John McLaughlin, as separate artists (Or "Old yellow Moon" to show up under Emmylou Harris & Rodney Crowell, separately).

The Artist field in JRiver supports a list of values, so the artists can be entered as "Carlos Santana" separated by ";" and then John McLaughlin. I have an ARTISTSORT that supports list values. With the Listitem() function I can extract, either of the artists and their sort values.

If I was content to sort by First name then I can get Love, Devotion & Surrender under Carlos Santana and under John McLaughlin. but I can't find a way to get these to sort properly on Santana and also on McLaughlin. as it stands I have John McLaughlin as the first artist in my view, because of differing custom sort values (The other album is with Chick Corea).

I have a view with the categories as Artist, and a custom Sort Year Album. is there a way to extract the Category name so I can use the Category Artist to see if one of my sort artists corresponds ?

or do I need a different view scheme ?

Any ideas ?

[Samson]

I would be interested if anyone comes up with an expression or other automated way to do this consistently and reliably ([edit] based on last name, first name)

I started out this way but decided there were too many exceptions to make it work properly, at least, I couldnt get it to work.Not sure how foobar or others achieve this or close to it ?

As I was having to make decisions about " should the bee gees be called gees, the bee or bee gees,the" or "Joe Cocker and friends" ,I guessed it would be impossible for a machine to decide.

I did my artist tagging manually in  a non standard way which works well for me and MC sorts accordingly. I realize this is not a viable option for impoting 50,000 albums. If, however, you already have your external folder structure manually well organised MC may possibly parse the file and fill the tags from the file path.Others would need to advice on using custom expressions on import or just try selcting a few files and r click> library tools > fill properties from filename

Once tagged correctly, as you know, getting tracks to reference two or more artists is easy.

[MrC]

I suggested a way of using "and" vs. "&" to help automate this:

    http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=78168.msg531385#msg531385

It might be of some use to you folks.

[kstuart]

I have found that sorting by Last Name is essentially hopeless.

Since many pop artists are properly sorted by the first word - even if they are a person's name, such as "Jethro Tull", then the whole thing requires hundreds if not thousands of hours of your life to do it by Last name when that is proper and First word when that is proper.

If you use the online tagging databases, they just use the First Word for everything.

So, I just look for John McLaughlin under "J".  You get used to it quickly.   It only offends my pedantic OCD side, which is good to suppress.

Then the collaborations work by making the Artist:

  Carlos Santana and John McLaughlin ; Carlos Santana ; John McLaughlin

which means it will be found under all three possibilities (since MC18 uses ";" as a delimiter between Artists)

PS   I'm currently cleaning out my  closet and basement.  After just finishing throwing out many carefully created VHS tapes and audio cassettes from the 80s and 90s, I am acutely aware of how one can spend too much time doing something that may never end up being used... so spend more time listening to John McLaughlin and less time sorting him...

[Stopeter44]

PS   I'm currently cleaning out my  closet and basement.  After just finishing throwing out many carefully created VHS tapes and audio cassettes from the 80s and 90s, I am acutely aware of how one can spend too much time doing something that may never end up being used... so spend more time listening to John McLaughlin and less time sorting him...

That made me laugh, I've spent loads of time tagging and retagging, and untagging and .....

I just gave up for the time being, although I use custom fields ARTIST SORT and ALBUM ARTIST SORT, along with ZARTISTSORT and ZZALBUM ARTIST SORT, the later fields are calculated fileds depending the presence, or not, of "SORT" values. works for most cases but hasn't fixed my duo problem.