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[AustinBike]

I am anal-retentive (yes, it's hyphenated) and I want to find a way to easily identify those artists with music that falls into more than one genre. With an ipod, there is nothing worse than scrolling though "Rock" only to find that the one U2 album you wanted was in "alternative".

I'd like a to see if someone could devise a filter that would only show artists that have more than one genre attributed to their music.

Any ideas?

[hit_ny]

You are looking for a way to assign more than one genre to a file. This is possible with a custom list type field. So its very easy in MC to do what you want.

The harder part is if you want to do this in the iPod ?

Do you want to be able to find music with more than one genre using the ipod and ipod only ?

[marko]

hit_ny got in there while I was typing. I'll post this anyway in case you do want to do it with MC.
currently, dynamic ipod playlists are not supported by MC.

hit_ny, the way I read it, AustinBike wants to identify tracks by the same artist, that have different genres.

Go to: tools > options > library
click the 'add' button and make the dialogue like so:


Click OK, click OK again.

Now, the following search should get you close to what you want:

[media type]=audio ~sort=[artist] ~nodup=[ag] ~dup=[artist]

-marko.

[AustinBike]

No, I guess I wasn't clear.

I want go go back through my collection and if I have an artist that has multiple genres I'd like to be able to change them all to one.

If I had a filter, it would make sorting through the 4000+ artists a lot easier.

In addition, once I've cleaned up my collection it would allow me to more easily keep track from time to time to make sure that I am not duplicating the problem again.

Here's what I use to find multiple genres:



As you can see, I can pull up all of the songs from an artist and update all the genres so that they all match. 

I just need a filter so I don't have to sift through 4000 artists.  Especially fi many of them are one song artists from compilations.

Thanks.

[marko]

OK.... This still appears to be working as you wish....

Set up the custom field as I posted above.
then go to the viewscheme you have posted, and edit it.
All you want to do is place the following string into step 4: pick files to show.

[media type]=audio ~sort=[artist] ~nodup=[ag] ~dup=[artist] ~a

click OK and you should be done.

[AustinBike]

Nope, that is not working.

I go from ~4200 artists to ~3800 artists, many of which still have a single associated genre.

What I am trying to do is filter out all artists that only have 1 associated genre so that I can re-tag the remaining artists and assign them a single genre per artist.

I can scross through the whole list, but that is pretty manual and the screen refreshes take a while on my server. I was hoping to filter out those that don't need to be fixed.

[marko]

hmmmm... regardless of [album]?
===========

It's the '~a' at the end causing that. my mistake
I think this gets you pretty close, but for these (multiple artists) albums getting in the way. They would be easy to exclude if you preferred.

here's the thinking behind the search above, as, if you know what it's doing, the results may make more sense or be better equipped to tweak things to suit:

[media type]=audio ~sort=[artist] ~nodup=[ag] ~dup=[artist] ~a

optional, self explanatory rules
[ag] is the field we created earlier using the [artist] and [genre] field. If you have 20 'abba' tracks labelled 'Pop', 5 'abba' tracks labelled 'rock', and 1 'rod, jane & freddy' track labelled 'rubbish', this rule will leave you with 3 tracks...

1 Abba-Rock track
1 Abba-Pop track
1 Rod, Jane & Freddy-Rubbish track
this keeps only duplicate artists, so Rod Jane & Freddy get dropped from the list
(which is what you want, right?)

You now have a list containing only artists that have differing [genre] tags, showing you a single example of each different genre that exists for each of those artists.

This is close, but not close enough. to be able to mass edit each artist's genre field, you need to be able to see them. right-click > locate > album would get old pretty fast

enter the final piece of the string. ~a specifies that for the remaining files, all other files that match their [album] tags should also be listed.

This works well for regular albums, but also reintroduces the flotsam generated by compilation albums. Adding:
-[Album Artist (auto)]=[/(Multiple Artists/)]
to the end of the search string should dramatically clean up things up, and return a list that is easy to read and work with, and that updates itself when it's loaded. (Hit F5 to reload)

Save the multi artist albums for another day!

[AustinBike]

OK,  I give up.

When I do this it works, but not the right way.

For instance, the Beatles shows up with 2 albums (out of about 15 or so) the first being "Rock" and the second one "Rock/Pop". If I change the second one to "Rock" and refresh, another "Rock/Pop" beatles album shows up.

Apparently I can only do one compare at a time, so this is more trouble than it is worth.

Hello manual process.

[marko]

I tried. I am only human

Going through manually, try ~sort=[artist],[genre] in step 4 of the viewscheme setup, then work away in the file list. The artists will be grouped, allowing you to select them all, then edit their genres 'inline' by right-clicking in the genre field and selecting 'rename' from the menu. The resulting dropdown list will contain all genres, with the currently slected ones filtered to the top of the list.

-marko.

[hit_ny]

nice effort there marko

The fundamental problem here, is that there is no way to compare values between 2 separate files, so the best you can expect is to group the similar items together and then manually edit in the panes.

[marko]

exactly