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[Flobalob]

Following on from the 'Tagging Classical' thread below...
Has anyone figured out a GOOD way to mix classical and pop in the same library?
I like to have my classical sorted by composer and the pop stuff sorted by artist. I realize that I can have two libraries but would like to keep everything together.
It would be great if somehow I could have a separate items in the left pane under the library heading for 'Classical' and one for 'Pop'. Acctually, this is easy to do, but having classical excluded from the pop list and vice versa is not so easy.
and having different view schemes for the two is also not easy.
Anyway, if anyone has found an easy way to accomplish this, I would love to know about it.
Thanks

[rocketsauce]

...but having classical excluded from the pop list and vice versa is not so easy.

...and having different view schemes for the two is also not easy.

Not sure what you mean by "not easy". There are several ways that you could easily build different view schemes or view scheme groups within the same library so that they each exclude files from the other.

Rob

[Flobalob]

Really..?
I know I could have two different view schemes of the same library but do not know how to exclude files from each other.
Also, when importing new files where would they go to?

[rocketsauce]

Well, if you're familiar with how smartlists work, I've recently come to realize that almost all of the rules that can be used to build smartlists can also be used in view schemes! If you're not yet familiar with smartlists, I highly recommend reading up on them in the Help file.

So, if I understand you correctly, you want the pop and classical in the same library, but not sorted together in the same view schemes (ie., you don't want Beethoven following BeeGees in a list of artists)?

If you assign genres to your classical music, I would imagine that there is not much/any overlap between the genre names that you use for pop music and those that you use for classical. In other words, you won't have any pop music classified as baroque and you won't have any classical marked as rock, etc. You could then build a pop view scheme that would automatically not include any classical genres and you could build a classical view scheme that only includes your classical genres. Of course, this method is dependent on you having the genre filled in for all your tracks.

A much simpler option, IMO, would be to simply create a new custom field (Tools/Options/Tree & View Settings) and use that field to "mark" which tracks are classical. Then you could build your pop view scheme to not include tracks that are "marked" in that custom field and build your classical view scheme to only include tracks that are "marked" in that field.

Let me know if any of this make sense.

Rob

[Flobalob]

Hey Thanks Rob
I did not realize that the view scheme had advance filtering capabilities.
I don't use genres because almost all music fits in more than one.
Instead I used your suggestion and used the 'composer' field as a filter.
If it has one, it goes to the classical scheme, if it doesn't, it doesn't.
Thanks again, I'll play with it more.

[mollw]

re classical vs pop,

I'm working on a mixed mac and pc network (although gradually drifting towards mac) and have found the following kludge to be... well a kludge, but a robust one...

for jazz and pop music the artist is in the artist field, and the composer field is (mostly) blank.

for classical music I put the COMPOSER in the artist field and the PERFORMER in the composer field.

I figue I'm either going to want to play bach or art pepper for instance, although if I do want to play glenn gould playing bach then I can do that by referring to the composer field.

Counter-intuitive maybe but really pretty simple.

A further refinement is for jazz, where you often find collaborations (oscar peterson with stan getz etc etc.) To limit the number of artists appearing on my ipod I list only one artist in the artist field, and list the whole lot in the composer field.....

All a bit clumsy,but actually works really well and is cross-platform transportable. (You have to remember that nothing on the mac has the power of media jukebox, although itunes is very nice in a completely different way...)

regards

m

[Phydeaux]

Now I know that I'm more retentive than most. But here goes!

All music, classical, pop, even heavy metal, has a composer, somewhere along the line.

Take, for example, Queen. A lot of their music was composed by Freddie Mercury, and some by Brian May. Some were collaborated efforts from the whole band. While I realise the unliklihood of wanting to listen to some "Brian May", the fact remains that he did compose it.

Similarly, I find it amazing that Johann Sebastian could possibly play the instruments in an orchestra (all at once) and possibly also conduct. As such, I use a artist field that consists of "[ORCHESTRA] [/ CHOIR] [/ SOLOIST(s)] [/ CONDUCTOR]" to end up with a field:

> Boston Pops / Fielding

or

> London Philharmonic / Tikanawa / Smith

This is for searching purposes only since I have other fields which are used to group soloists, conductors, orchestras and choirs.

Perhaps this bloats my tags (well, actually it does!), but I appreciate the "completeness" of the information. At least, if someone says to me: I really like David Hill's organ playing -- I can see if I have any David Hill and play it. Or that they enjoy Arthur Fielder's conducting... etc.

It's not a requirement, by any stretch of the imagination, but just makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside... Or something.

Anway, that's my opinion on the subject of how to tag them.

I also keep Pop and Classical together in the same DB. I sort them out by means of a few smartlists.

I keep a genre field for all classical music that groups it in to categories such as "Sonata", "Symphony", "Suite", or even "Classical" for those that I can't be bothered to classify. My smarlist then has the rule:

> Genre=Sonata,Symphony,Suite,Classical,Concerto, etc...

I have created a Media Library Group in addition to Audio, Video, Images of "Classical". This simply has the rule "Playlist=Classical" associated with it to only use the music in the Classical playlist. In the "Audio" section, I edited that to show "-Playlist=Classical". This forces it to ignore everything that is in the Classical playlist.

An aside: I use the Year field for the year that the piece was recorded and have a separate field for Year Composed. This allows me to have smartlists that can automatically group music from the Baroque, Classical or Romantic periods very easily. Of course, this is a little more grey than black and white, but it seems to work really well.

I hope that this gives some of you some ideas for your own DB's!

P.