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[syndromeofadown]

I am currently using “Artist” and “Album Artist” for all of my Audio. It works well and is compatible with all of my devices.

I would like to add another field, I’ll call it “Contributing Artists” for now. This field would be a list of all band members for each song in my library. The need for this is due the large number of bands that most of my favourite musicians are in. Once the tags are entered I should be able to select all of their works easily.

An example would be if I was to select Thom Yorke under the “Contributing Artists” pane.
I would then see all albums from Radiohead, his solo work, and Atoms for Peace. I would also see all albums/songs he was a contributing artist on including UNKLE-Psyence Fiction, Drugstore-White Magic for Lovers, etc. Basically everything he has ever done in one convenient list.

Another example would be when I select Maynard James Keenan.
I would then see all albums from Tool, APC, Puscifer, Children of the Anachronistic Dynasty, and Texans. I would also see all albums/songs he was a contributing artist on including Rage Against the Machine, Green Jelly- Cereal Killer Soundtrack, Deftones- White Pony, Axis of Justice, etc.

Another benefit to this having this field is that while listening to a song I would be able to see all of contributing artists, then select them to see what else they have done. Then while listening to what they have done i could select work from other artists they have worked with, and so on.
An example would be if i was listening to Radiohead i would see a list of contributing artists including: Thom Yorke, Jonny Greenwood, Ed O'Brien, Colin Greenwood, and Phil Selway. I could then select Thom Yorke to see all of his works, and choose Atoms for Peace. Then while listening to Atoms for Peace i would see a list of contributing artists including: Thom Yorke, Flea, Nigel Godrich, Joey Waronker,  and Mauro Refosco. I could then select Flea and choose Red Hot Chili Peppers etc.

I would want this new field to be stored in my mp3 and flac tags, not just in the database.
Compatibly with other software is not an issue because all i use is j river and i don’t care about this much detail on a portable device.

I suppose the point of me posting this is that i am wondering if people are already doing this and if so how?

I don’t want to figure out a way to do this if a simple way already exists and is being used.

Thanks for any help

[rick.ca]

I often wonder about this, in part because I have all the equivalent information for movies. From that experience, I can tell you that MC can handle the data, and it's not very complicated. However it's done, it will involve using one or more list fields. I would go a step further and suggest using a nested list field. The simplest form of that would be Name\Role, where "role" could be that played by a primary musician (e.g., vocals, guitar), backup (e.g., choir) or a production credit (e.g., engineer).

The more difficult question is, where is the information going to come from? Will it include just the primary musicians (i.e., "group members") or other credits as well? Will it be by track, or just by album? Will it be consistent? How will it be captured?

As an experiment, I decided to try capturing some information from AllMovies. I have no idea how broad or accurate it is, but they do have album-level credits data presented as a Name|Credits table. It's a bit tedious, but I was able to capture it as follows:

• Copy table to clipboard (requires a Firefox add-on)
• Paste Special (text) to Excel
• Invoke Text Import Wizard to change paste to use tab and comma delimiters
• Formula in worksheet convert Name|Credit1|Credit2... data to Name\Credit1|Name\Credit2... and add carriage returns so each Name/Credit value is on a separate line
• Copy converted data to clipboard (requires an Excel add-on to handle the carriage returns properly)
• Put the destination fields for the album in edit mode in MC, selecting the Edit all with text editor option
• Paste the credits and exit edit mode

It's not quite as tedious as it sounds, just a lot of mouse-clicks. I suppose I could do an album in under a minute, but there's no way I could sustain that speed. It beats entering the data manually. Needless to say, it would be wonderful if it could somehow happen automatically.

My test was to get the information for my Beatles albums. The screen shot illustrates the results. (It seems the Fab Four had help from 197 other people.) Note I've put the credits in the People (standard list) field which is a pane in this view. In this shot, I'm using that pane to select John Lennon. The pane shows all his roles, and the list shows the albums he's credited on. From this point one might use this to see he played sax on the White Album.

[ProblemChild]

If I understand you, this is what I do with my tracks, and I'm sure quite a few others
on this forum do as well, since that's where I learned how to.
I've tried several different field names, now I just have three additional fields (lists),
[Artists Featured] - the obvious, plus I use for soundtracks, cast recordings etc - to list artists names sometimes
[Artist Covered] - ie [Artist] Mana performing a [Artist Covered] Led Zep song,
[Artist Aliases] - I sort of wound up lumping all my other needs for an additional artist field here, at least for now as I update my library,
so for [Artist] Genesis, say, I list "Collins, Phil;Banks, Tony;Rutherford, Mike"

Then I have another field (also a list)
[Artist List] - sums all the artist fields into one, using

Code: [Select]

=ListCombine(ListBuild(1,;,[Album Artist],[Artist],[Artist Alias],[Artist Covered],[Artists Featured],[Band],[Composer],[Lyricist],[Orchestra],[Conductor]),)&datatype=[list]
So then I have a view category with the field [Artist Alias] that lists everyone. So if I select, say, "Collins, Phil" - all genesis albums AND all solo stuff AND all compilation stuff comes up, if I want. I dont have time to go over the creation of views but you can get very creative. Just search on the list functions and you should be able to come up
with a lot. Also try searching under nested fields. Hope it helps. There's a lot on this forum, it just has to be found. If I find some links later I'll post them.

[Vincent Kars]

I use the Artist tag to enter all the musicians and separates the names by a ;
I use a calculated field to transform Artist into a list (a trick learned from Gappie)
More details: http://thewelltemperedcomputer.com/SW/Players/MC14/MC_Multiple.htm

[syndromeofadown]

Thank you for the replies. You have given me a lot of help and also a lot to think about.

To answer the questions given to me...
Most of the information I plan on adding will come from Wikipedia. All manually entered.
I will be doing this for audio only, as all my videos are tagged.
The new fields will consist of musicians only. I don’t care about labels, producers, etc.
My plan is to select a bands entire works and add the same info to all tracks at the same time, then edit specific tracks and albums for any member changes.
My library has over 20,000 tracks but I mainly listen to just a few thousand of them. These are the main focus. I have no intention of doing this for all tracks.

I haven’t dealt much with lists or expressions and I’m sure it will take a while for me to figure out the best way to personalize all of the described ways for using them. I like the idea of nested list field with Name\Role.  I will post whatever I come up with some time in the next month.

Again thanks for the help