It seems you've missed some basics about how the program works. Gappie is right, you can organize things any way you like, but without any underlying order, nothing is going to work very well. So please put smartlists and playlists out of your mind, and consider only music for now. If you can understand the basics, you'll be able to handle other media types as well, and you'll have much better luck using smartlists and playlists.
I may not be understanding you fully, but it sounds like there is some order to how your music files are stored on disk. You said, for example, "i had everything sorted in windows by genres, artist, album, and thats how it should be viewed." So my suggestion is to start with that—to get the same information that is contained in your file structure into your library, or at least compare it to whatever equivalent information has been recorded in your library (i.e., do this with your existing library). This is what I suggest you do:
1. Right click on
Audio, and select
Customize View...2. Complete the
Customize View dialog to look exactly exactly like the following illustration. The key here is in adding a disk location to the
Categories list. To do this, click
Add... and in the
View Scheme Item dialog, select
Type File path. Then browse to the directory you would like to add. If your music is in more than one location, I suggest you just add one for now. You can experiment with that, then add the others later.
3. What you see now should be something similar to this:
First, play with the the
Location pane at the top left. Note how it behaves exactly like the tree structure of your directories in Windows. In the bottom half of the screen, the albums and files contained in the selected directory are displayed. While I wouldn't normally care to see it, I've included
Filename in the file details listed. I've done this for two reasons. First, so you can see that the Location pane is just providing you the means to navigate to any directory location. Second...
4. I want you to see how a number of the key fields in my music library are the same as that contained by the filename (path). In fact, the pathname I use for all my music files can be expressed as [fields] thus: \[Genre]\[Artist]\[Year] [Album]\[track#] [Name].mp3. I don't expect you're this organized, but I'm guessing you will see there is valuable information in your file structure when you look at it this way.
5. Now you should be in a position to create, update or correct your library information (i.e., genre, artist, year, album, track number and name) to make it the same as what is reflected in the file structure. MC provides a very powerful tool for doing this automatically: Select the files you want to update, right-click and select
Library Tools\Fill Properties from Filename... 6. As you might imagine,
Fill Properties from Filename won't work very well if your file naming practise is inconsistent. But it may give you a good starting point for populating those fields. Then you can use the location pane to select files for "manual" tagging. For example, let's say
your Led Zeppelin albums are saved in "LedZep" or "Lead Zepellin" directories, or "Led Zeppelin" appears both before and after the album name in the directory structure (or whatever you mean by "messy"). As long as you can find them, you can select them and change the Artist tag to "Led Zeppelin."
7. Once you have competed the tagging, you will be able to rely completely on the Library to locate your music. In other words, you will locate any item by Genre - Artist - Album, rather than an actual file location. The day will come when you are happier with the library information than your file structure. MC doesn't care where the files are stored, but if you want to "clean up" your file structure, you can do so with the
Rename, Move & Copy Files tool.
8. You mentioned the Keywords field. Note there are many other standard fields of various types that you may want to use instead—so you can keep track of similar attributes separately, rather than calling everything a keyword. If there isn't an appropriate standard field for something you want to record, you can create a user field. You mentioned collections. For the few collections I have, the Album is the collection name. But if you have a lot of collections, you may prefer to have a separate
Collection field.
9. To avoid potential confusion, I should point out that most, if not all, library information can be saved in the individual music files as well as the library. This is done with
Library Tools\Update Tags (from library). Note there is also the tool
Update Library (from tags). If you have some files for which no library information has been recorded, you may want to try this first to see if the information you need is already recorded in the file tags.
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Topic: Smartlists, Playlist, Library... HOW? (Read 10836 times)