I noticed when going to artists i have multiple artists with the same name example... 2pac, 2pac feat, 2pacft, etc... is there a easy way to rename all these so only one artist of 2 pac would show up just once!?
I noticed when going to artists i have multiple artists with the same name example... 2pac, 2pac feat, 2pacft, etc... is there a easy way to rename all these so only one artist of 2 pac would show up just once!?
| Artist | I always use this field for the most generic names, since that makes them easier to find on my IPOD. For instance, all Janis Joplin albums are listed under 'Joplin, Janis' - even the Big Brother & The Holding Company albums. To accurately keep track of the artists for those albums, I use other fields. That way on my IPOD all of her songs appear together in 1 place, since [Artist] is (if it's not a mix album) the field [Album Artist(auto)] uses and will therefore be used on the IPOD as 'Artist'. The rest of the fields here are all user-created and list-type. | ||||||
| Album Artists: | Where I enter all the artists associated with this *album* (not just 1 song). Using the above example, *this* is where I would enter it as 'Big Brother & The Holding Company', since that's the name appearing on the album. If 2 artists are listed, I enter them both here. | ||||||
| Song Artists: | This is where I place names of artists who contributed to a single song (or at least not the whole album). If one of the tracks on a Big Brother album was listed as "I don't want a pickle, featuring Arlo Guthrie", I'd enter this (for this one track):
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| Cover Artists: | If this is a tribute album or song, say like the album 'Encomium' (a tribute to Zep by multiple artists), then I put 'Led Zeppelin' in this field, so later when I look under 'Zep' these songs will show up. | ||||||
| Aliases: | Any names I want to be able to use (in my library, not the IPOD) to find this album or song. For instance, any songs by the Jackson 5 would have 'Jackson, Michael' in this field, so when I look under 'Jackson, Michael', in addition to his solo albums, these appear as well. | ||||||
| All Artists: | this is a auto-calculated field: it takes all of the artists' names in the fields above (except 'Artist') and combines them into one entry. T hen I can use this field in a view pane and find anything I want under any of the above names. Here's the expression I use for my user-field 'AlbumArtists': Code: [Select] =ListCombine(ListCombine(ListCombine([AlbumArtists],[Aliases]),[Song Artists]), [Cover Artists])&DataType=[List] |
| So for example, part of our fake Big Bro album:
Now everything on my IPOD comes up under Joplin, Janis, making it easy to find. In MC, though, I can find these songs in many ways: In the view pane 'Artists' I can find all of the 'Big Brother' albums by looking under 'Big Brother' The best part, though, for me is that in the view pane 'All Artists', I can find all of these songs by looking under either 'Joplin, Janis' OR 'Big Bro..' If I wanted to find them under 'Pearl', I'd just add 'Pearl' to the Aliases tag. Also, when I select 'Guthrie, Arlo', in addition to showing me his solo albums, this track will also appear there (or the entire album if you want). This is not as much extra work as it seems - it usually only involves using 'move/copy fields' (from the popup menu\Library Tools) to copy from [Artist] to [AlbumArtists]. Most of the time that's it. Then if there are any aliases I want to add, I just select the entire album, type them into [Aliases] and they auto-fill in. The only real time-consumer is when extra artists are involved, figuring out where and how to list them. For me, the benefits of being able to find my music in any number of ways makes it well worth it. Quote the name is... 111 John Travolta - Greased Lightnin' and artist says decades and album says Wow that was the 70's Regarding editing columns of songs, and replacing/adding information, For adding 'newtext' at the beginning/end of a field, you can select the whole column, enter '=newtext[fieldname]' or '=[fieldname]newtext'and it will auto-fill. For example, all of my mix-albums are named '[MA] TheRealAlbumName'. After I import a CD - "Hits of the 70's" for instance - I click anywhere on the 'Album' column, press Ctrl-A to highlight all of the songs, then press F2 to edit. I then type '=[MA] [Album]' and press enter. MC automatically prepends '[MC] ' to every entry. Track# Album ----- ----- 1 "Hits of.." 2 "Hits of.." 3 "Hits of.." after entering '=[MA] [Album]' becomes Track# Album ----- ----- 1 "[MA] Hits of.." 2 "[MA] Hits of.." 3 "[MA] Hits of.." In the middle of a field, you can use the Mid() expression, ie =Mid([Album], 3, 2) returns 2 characters from the 'Album' field, starting at the 3rd character. Most of the time, what I need to do is remove text from either the beginning or end of a field. If I wanted to remove the '[MA] ' prefix from all of my albums, I would select/edit them as above, then enter '=Mid([Album], 4, -1)' where '-1' tells MC you want it to fetch ALL of the remaining characters. You can also combine these. For instance, Track# Album ----- ----- 1 "Hits of the 70's" 2 "Hits of the 70's" 3 "Hits of the 70's" after entering '=[MA] Mid([Album],1,3)Mid([Album],7,-1)' becomes Track# Album ----- ----- 1 "[MA] its the 70's" 2 "[MA] its the 70's" 3 "[MA] its the 70's" Because I do this so often, I've created some auto-calculated fields to make this easier (Options \ Library & Folders \ Manage Library Fields). Each field is nothing more than a shorthand for using the Mid() expression in a particular field. For me, I'm usually removing text from the beginning of either the [Name], [Album], or [Artist] field, so that's what they all do - they all remove text from the beginning of one of these fields. They're named according to the field they edit: 'n1','n2','n3'... (for the name field) 'al1', 'al2', 'al3'... (for the album field) and 'ar1', 'ar2', 'ar3'... (for 'artist'). The digit tells me how many characters will be removed (I use 1 through 5). The 'al4' field, for instance, removes the first 4 characters from the [Album] field. It's just a user-created field that contains the expression '=Mid([Album],4,-1)' The 'n2' field corresponds to the expression '=Mid([Name],2,-1), 'ar2'- 2 chars from [Artist], and so on... The advantage here is speed. Now that I've created these fields, I can use them to type fewer characters. In the example here - removing the prefixed '[MA] ' from my 'Album' field, I highlight everything, press F2 to edit, then type '=[al5]' I get the same result as if I'd typed '=Mid([Album],5,-1)' it's only a few characters, but going through a whole library it makes a big difference. Hope that makes sense and helps some :) |