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More => Old Versions => Media Center 11 (Development Ended) => Topic started by: ChrisRainman on September 30, 2003, 02:07:20 am

Title: Handling Complete Albums vs single songs
Post by: ChrisRainman on September 30, 2003, 02:07:20 am
I would to know some opinions or suggestions for handling albums in contrast to single tracks.

I assign a lot of properties to each individual song by tagging the files. I have added some user-specific tags to my files like mood and situation to be able to filter the songs more easily.

Now there are also some properties referring to complete albums. How could I handle them? E.g. compilation albums and Best of's are released in 2003 but the tracks are recorded in different years before. I would like to keep both dates because

(1) I use the album release date in my file naming convention (e.g. The Beatles\2000 - The Beatles - One)

(2) I want to keep the original song release date to be able to filter all songs for that specific year.

Furthermore, I would like to tag certain albums as favourites or add album related comments.

I am thinking of something like album tags which are only assigned to complete albums or group of tracks.

Has anybody of you similar "organization problems" and found workarounds?

Any suggestions for a MC10?



Title: Re: Handling Complete Albums vs single songs
Post by: crowfan on September 30, 2003, 05:00:47 am
I would support this idea. One day soon, I'm going to have too much in my library to fit on my 30g iPod. I'd like to be able to rate whole albums and then create a Smartlist which pulls only those albums with a certain rating. That way, I could put the good albums on my iPod and leave off the other stuff.

It can be done with a custom field, but it would be nice to only have to input the rating once per album, quickly. It would help when you have to tag thousands of albums.

crow
Title: Re: Handling Complete Albums vs single songs
Post by: lise on October 01, 2003, 06:14:09 am
Hey Chris,

Here's what I do.

My years all go with the track release, not the album.

The album's release year is included in the title of the album or in the filename (path), just like you, so you can always search for it or write a rule.

I use keywords like "compilation" or "greatest hits" type things to distinguish the type of album.  But this keywords thing is new, and I haven't noodled with it much yet to see if there is much of a difference from the way I used to do it with 8.0, which was to have a smartlist search for things like "best", "greatest", "hits", etc in the album fields.
Title: Re: Handling Complete Albums vs single songs
Post by: _K_C_ on October 01, 2003, 07:23:54 am
I've got a list of requests waiting for when they start soliciting suggestions for MC 10 and creating an "album" object is one of them.

"Create an album object
Allows creation of personal best of / compilation albums that integrate with genuine album view schemes

A playlist isn't actually far from being an album object, save that it can't be integrated into view schemes.  Perhaps one other way to look at this would be to allow smart/play lists to be integrated into standard view schemes, and to assign properties (Genre / Artist / Album etc) to smart/playlists.

eg (1) I have quite a few B.B.King albums.  Create a smartlist containing my 10 most played tracks, and list it as a Personal Best Of next to the rest of the BB King albums.

eg (2) Automatically create a playlist for every complete album.  This could be given properties different to the individual tracks on the album."

It's a change from the current model which is entirely track based, but I think it would be a big step forward.