Print

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

[Fred1]

1. Fixed: Copy/Paste of file list data was only pasting file pathnames, not the data from the list grid.

Does this mean that you can paste data from a spreadsheet (Numbers App) to MC's views for tagging?
Would programs like KeyboardMaestro work now when pasting to fields in MC's grid?

[glynor]

Does this mean that you can paste data from a spreadsheet (Numbers App) to MC's views for tagging?
Would programs like KeyboardMaestro work now when pasting to fields in MC's grid?

It is about pasting out of MC into external applications.

You can copy the contents of a view and paste them into Excel (or anything that can accept Comma Separated Value lists).  I can confirm it works again on the Mac version tomorrow, but this has long-worked on MC on Windows (and apparently previously on Mac, and it broke at some point). They fixed it.

It is not about pasting anything into MC.

[Fred1]

It is not about pasting anything into MC.

Oh, that's bad news  .
It would be so cool if you could get data out of MC, then process it outside and finally paste the processed data back to MC.

Would make cleaning up metadata very effective.

[glynor]

MC can import metadata using the MPL file format. So it is possible to do so if you can export out a text file and make it into an MPL.

What kind of cleanup are you looking to do externally?  MC has very powerful text manipulation tools built in. If you feel you need to do it externally, there are probably a bunch of tricks you don't know about.

[Fred1]

I have tons of titles to clean up.
For example all names like "Blah blah (live)" have to read "Blah blah" and " (live)" has to go as "Live" into it's own field. And there are many other cases. 

I do it with the MC expression language, including RegExes.
Nevertheless it is very time consuming either to type in the expressions into the respecting fields or copy them out of a textfile and paste them into these fields (even if i mark some or many lines).

If MC were able to accept textmacros from programs like Keyboard Maestro or others, or MC could execute its own macros, it would be easier. But that's not the case.

So processing the data externally (perhaps with Perl or AppleScript) would be a great progress if the result could be pasted back to MC.

I have no clue how the MPL file format is constructed.
Perhaps this would be another way to do things, but more complicated.

[glynor]

or MC could execute its own macros, it would be easier. But that's not the case.

Sure it can.

Calculated fields are saved expressions.  I never type out (or paste in) an expression I use regularly.  If you have an expression you use regularly, make it into a field, then instead of typing out very long expression, you type:

=[My Saved Expression's Name]

[Fred1]

That's an aspect i didn't know of - thanks!

Nevertheless, there are so many different expressions i use to normalize my fields, that this probably doesn't work for me.

[glynor]

Nevertheless, there are so many different expressions i use to normalize my fields, that this probably doesn't work for me.

Why? You can make as many custom fields as you want.  I probably have 30 or 40 in my Library that I use from time to time.

[blgentry]

Here's another couple of things to consider about this:

1.  If you have 30 or 40 MC expressions you use, you could make a View that uses these expressions as columns.  Then you can view any file, song, album, artist, etc, and see the effect of any of your expressions on those songs.  If it makes more sense to group them together in a certain way, you could have 5, 6, or 7 views that had lots of common expressions grouped into each view so you could work on combinations of problems that you see together frequently.

If you couple this with MC's ability to do saved expressions as a selection Pane in a View, things start to get REALLY interesting.  I've only discovered this recently, and it's pretty neat.  It adds some serious utility to Views, especially views that I use for maintenance.  For example:

I have a view I use to review my cover art.  The first Pane in that view has three saved expressions in it.  One that shows only songs with no cover art.  A second one that shows files with cover art that is less than 480 x 480.  The third selection is just "all", which essentially removes that filter.  Depending upon what you see frequently, you might be able to use this to really streamline your cleanup process.

2.  The famous (and unfortunately gone) Mr. C wrote a Perl program a while back that turns CSV files into MPL.  Here I found it for you:

http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=89211.msg612678#msg612678

I haven't tested this AT ALL.

3.  I've been writing my own set of Python scripts to read and write MPL to do some types of manipulation that are very hard to do in MC, or just plain not possible.  I'm far from complete, but it's been interesting.  I wonder if I should just try out the above script instead though.  Hmm, something for me to think about.

Good luck,

Brian.

[Fred1]

If you couple this with MC's ability to do saved expressions as a selection Pane in a View, things start to get REALLY interesting.  I've only discovered this recently, and it's pretty neat.  It adds some serious utility to Views, especially views that I use for maintenance.

That sounds interesting but i can't quite imagine it.
Could you please make a screenshot of such a view, so i can have a look on it?

I will try Mr. C's Perlscript for creating MPLs. I hope i can run it on a Mac.
Too bad that Mr. C isn't here anymore. Does anybody know what happened?

Thanks for your help!

[Fred1]

Why? You can make as many custom fields as you want.  I probably have 30 or 40 in my Library that I use from time to time.

No, the custom fields are no problem.

The great number of expressions (and therefore columns in the view) makes the view a bit complex and confusing to find the right expression. But making different views for different cleanups might indeed reduce the complexity.

The next problem i face: I can't input "[" (Alt-5) and "]" (Alt-6) and all other letters that require the Alt-key (i'm on a german keyboard). The fields simply don't accept the keys. Pasting them from the clipboard works, however. A bug in MC?

[blgentry]

That sounds interesting but i can't quite imagine it.
Could you please make a screenshot of such a view, so i can have a look on it?

See the screen shot attached.  These Panes with saved expressions are really more like saved searches.  See the red arrow pointing to the first pane?  Those are saved expressions that filter my list of files based on the cover art.  The one I'm pointing to only shows me cover art that's less than 480 x 480 pixels.  The one above that, "no art" is a saved expression that looks for the [Image File] field being empty (so it has no cover art).  I can add as many of these to this Pane as I want, based on what I'm looking for.

The next Pane over, with the yellow arrow is another saved expression pane.  This time, it's looking for a custom field that I made called [Image_approved].  Some images are too small or something, but I still keep them anyway and I don't want to continually have them show up in this maintenance view because I've already deemed them to be "good enough".  So I set the image approved flag on those.  When I select that pane's value of "remove approved", it filters out everything I have set with "image approved", so I can work on the other images without being bothered by those others getting in the way.

I had imagined that you might make 5, 6, 7 or more saved searches that find different types of problems you have identified in your metadata.  For example, you said you want to remove "(Live)" in some fields.  You could make a saved search in one of your Panes that shows only that.  Or that shows that string only if certain other conditions are met.  You could make as many of these as you want, to find various common metadata problems.  I have a view that shows me Artists that start with "the" and artists that end with " , the ".  This could simply be a saved expression in a Pane like I'm talking about.

Now, in terms of saving your Expressions that do the work, the only way I know of doing this is putting them in Expression Columns.  You can add these Expression Columns to these Views and use them in conjunction with the saved searches in the Panes.  The columns will immediately show you the results and if you like them, you can cut and paste the expressions from the columns into the Tagging Pane to save these values and fix your metadata.

I hope my idea makes sense and more importantly, I hope you get something out of it.  Either way, good luck to you. 

Brian.

[Fred1]

Brian,

thank you for your explanations and the screenshot - now i got it .
This is a very sophisticated way to use MC's possibilities.

I will try to implement something similar in my workflow.
Your suggestions will help a lot for my extensive re-tagging project.

Fred