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[amargolis]

I have a very long list of composers and the historical periods (Early Music, Baroque, Classical etc.) they belong to. It is set up with the composer name in one column and the corresponding historical period in the next column.

Any ideas on a clever way to add the "period" value to each track in my library depending on the composer value already tagged to the track?

So if "composer" is "Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus" set "Period" to "Classical" based on the info in the spreadsheet?

[BryanC]

The easiest way to do it (at least to me) would be to use the search wizard. Click the search magnifying glass and select Wizard. Then in the rules set Composer to the relevant composer. Click Apply. Then just select all of the tracks, hit alt-enter and set the Period to Classical.

If you want to do it in a slightly faster way, then just create a new smartlist or a new view that contains all of your classical music and then order it by composer. From there you can just go down the list setting the period en masse by composer by selecting all of the tracks from each composer. If you have poor eyesight or non-nimble fingers you can also set it to group by composer so there are large breaks between each composer grouping.

An even more slightly faster way would be to create a smartlist or search wizard and just select all of the artists that belong to a certain period using the checkboxes. Then you can easily run a ctrl-A (select all) on all of the artists at the same time and update the period tag.

[amargolis]

Thanks for your reply.

I'm thinking more in terms of an expression or script that would do it automatically. Doing it individually is not really in the cards since I'm talking about 1000+ composers.

Probably someone more savvy than I could write an expression that would get it done?

It would be a pretty sweet feature for JRiver to have, if it could automatically associate the composer with his/her period. If anyone has any ideas as to how to do it, I'll be happy to share this list. It needs a little editing but I'll be happy to get it very accurate if we think we can do it.

[BryanC]

Thanks for your reply.

I'm thinking more in terms of an expression or script that would do it automatically. Doing it individually is not really in the cards since I'm talking about 1000+ composers.

Probably someone more savvy than I could write an expression that would get it done?

It would be a pretty sweet feature for JRiver to have, if it could automatically associate the composer with his/her period. If anyone has any ideas as to how to do it, I'll be happy to share this list. It needs a little editing but I'll be happy to get it very accurate if we think we can do it.

Well, you can do it programatically in MC only if you have the pertinent information to parse to place it into the right period, i.e. the correct year already tagged in MC. I can help you out if you want to think through this problem rationally. If you don't have that data inside MC, you'll need to do some wheeling and dealing outside of MC using your spreadsheet in order to build some search expressions. I don't know how your list is formatted but it's likely possible to accomplish in large batches. What I envision is that you will order your list by period, then select all of the composer names for that period and export as a csv file. You could then use notepad to replace all instances of ',' (or your less common, manually chosen delimiter) with " or [Composer]=". Then you can create a custom search or smartlist in MC by importing your huge search expression. Then set the tags for all of the composers in that search to the same period. You can probably get more complex and create a custom field that automatically propagates the period tag using a bunch of ifelse statements, but that might be just as time-consuming as the option I just outlined. Up to you.

The issue is that you can't really run a heuristic analysis on music files in MC, although it could probably be done to some extent in Musicbrainz.

[ferday]

it could be done with an expression in MC...the problem is you'd have to type in each composer anyways because there is no way of knowing which composer goes where so you aren't left anywhere good

there might be a way by exporting a playlist to .csv then importing back in to the library after changing things in Excel, i've never done that so i can't say.  i'm not aware of any programs that can tag from an .xls but it's possible that one exists if you search

otherwise, BryanC pretty well outline what you need to do.

[amargolis]

Thanks guys. Bryan - great idea. There are only 8 or 10 different periods I'm using, so I can easily do that many batches. I will sort the sheet by period as you said and then hopefully figure out how to export and delimit the list of composers from each period.

Will let you know how it goes and share broken up/delimited lists in case others want to try it in their collections.

Of course the other tricky thing is that there are so many different ways to name the composer (i.e. "last name", "first name", with accents vs. without accents, etc. etc. It'll have to be tweaked a lot for each individual collection.

[ferday]

tagging can suck sometimes but when it's done not only is it nice to have but future tagging operations tend to go so much quicker!

good luck, maybe post to this thread or a new one what you did and how it worked, that way maybe someone else (like myself) can learn something!

[blgentry]

What ever became of this project?  Did the OP get it solved?  I'm considering doing a little programming to make it happen.

Brian.

[amargolis]

Hi, yes I think we were close but there were still some things that needed to be worked out. I've been meaning to finalize the list of composers and their respective periods. It would be nice. I should be able to find the time this week and will let you know. Thank you!

[blgentry]

If you would like my help with this, please post a sample of your Composers to Periods spreadsheet here.  It doesn't need to be complete.  Just a representative sample.

With that, I'll see if I can help.

Brian.

[amargolis]

Ok, thanks Brian. I will do that tomorrow. Won't be able to today, unfortunately.

[amargolis]

Hi,
Ok I have a working list...can't seem to attach it here bc it's an unsupported doc format (.ods). Email?

Thanks for you help with this.

[blgentry]

I'm going to convert your spreadsheet to text when I get it.  Comma Separated Values (CSV) specifically.  I have Open Office, which *should* be able to read it.  But hey, why don't we kill two birds with one stone:  How about saving it as CSV.  Then change the file extension to .TXT.  Then you can attach it here. 

If it's really big (which I can't imagine), you could ZIP it first.  The forum accepts ZIP as attachments too.

Brian.

[amargolis]

Ok, here 'tis.

[amargolis]

^^^  Still needs LOTS of editing and expanding, by the way.

[blgentry]

Got it.  Looks pretty straight forward.  Depending on my schedule, this may take me a few days to work on.  I'll update here as I get some results.

Brian.

[flight16]

Might be overkill but I wrote a simple python wrapper around MCWS with the purpose of tagging.  Probably only useful if you know python.

[blgentry]

A non-update update on this...  I've been rather distracted with life stuff and have been answering posts here, but haven't had the kind of concentrated time necessary to sit down and program.  Sorry about that.  I can't say for sure when I'm going to have time to get around to this.  I'm still wanting to work on it, but things are a little crazy right now.

Thanks,

Brian.