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[AudioBorg]

I asked a question a couple of days ago about organizing complete albums and singles. I have been working on a couple of schemes in my test environment – thanks to all who responded with suggestions. They were very helpful.

So as I was learning how MC worked and experimenting I expanded my thought process to Smart Playlists and how ‘best’ to use tags to my advantage for on-the-fly playlist creation.

There are 3 of us in my house (myself, wife and daughter) that use MC. And I would say that 80-90% of the time we are listening to mixed tracks and not complete albums end-to-end. So the ability to create ‘dynamic’ playlists is very appealing to us. I have a pretty large collection (at least I think so at >1000 albums + several thousand singles) and it would be awesome to be able to create interesting playlists automatically.

For example, I thought perhaps I could make use of the rating tag by assigning a rating value to each of us so we could tag our favorite tracks. Of course right off the bat there is a problem with that approach – what if more than one of us likes a specific track? How do I differentiate? So I then thought why not use custom tags for this same scheme? But then I was unsure if the custom tags are actually stored in the files themselves or just a MC DB thing – which I might not like as I tend to do tag editing outside of MC. I also thought of using a predetermined rating to designate the released singles from an album, etc.

So, I guess what I’m wondering is if any of you might want to share your organization/tag usage schemes you have employed that provide for custom playlist creation other than the obvious standard tags and their standard definitions. I know this is one of those ‘six of one, half dozen of the other’ types things for which there are many possible options. I’m just looking for some ideas to get me started and perhaps, more important, some “watch out for’s” or “don’t do this” things.

[MrC]

Quick question - have you tried and tailored Play Doctor?

[AudioBorg]

No I haven't actually played with Play Doctor. Unless I misunderstood, I thought it's purpose/function was to allow MC to create an 'on-the-fly' playlists based on user defined rules.

I guess I'm thinking more about maximizing the flexibility of the rules I create in the first place - whether it be for Play Doctor use or to create stand-alone Smart Playlists.

In other words, I want to choose what is played by defining rules based on tag values/schemes other than those that are 'standard'.

Make any sense at all?

[MrC]

Play Doctor will use file rules to limit what can be selected.  It uses the same rules as Smartlists, and from the resulting files, randomizes (with some intelligence) playback.  It is not clear what the feedback loop is for narrowing or broadening criteria.

A use that might suit your needs - my wife and I were in our home office working, and it was raining.  So we created a Rain-related Play Doctor list and let it do its thing.

Keep in mind :

1) playlists are static - they are nothing more than a list of files that you've manually created
2) smartlists are semi-dynamic, in that files selected are based on static criteria you set.  Randomness can occur from within the defined criteria (and in one exception, be expanded beyond the criteria to include the remaining tracks from an album).
3) play doctor is a smartlist, with built-in randomness.  By default, the smartlist degenerates to all your audio, and the built-in randomness / likeness isn't well defined to MC users.

So, the question is, how do you see you and your family wanting to use various criteria for random playback?  It is not terribly difficult to create per-user ratings.

[AudioBorg]

Here's how I see us using various criteria (off the top of my head):

In the simplest sense I might want to create a smart playlist that was based on "My Favorites of the Rock genre between the years 1988 and 1995". I think I know how to do this with the exception of the "My Favorites" implementation.

Another case might be "All released singles from the indie and alternative genres from the years 2008 through 2012". Again, I know how to get this done with the exception of the "released singles" qualifier.

Now, as I sit here I'm not so sure I can quickly come up with other cases that are unique - which was sort of the reason I asked my original question -- to get additional ideas from others. Which, after having re-read it may have pushed the focus towards playlist creation rather than the implementation of selection criteria.

Something I don't quite understand: If I used the criteria from either scenario above to create a smart playlist and played that playlist with shuffle mode enabled how would doing that be different than using the same criteria with Play Doctor?

[rick.ca]

Something I don't quite understand: If I used the criteria from either scenario above to create a smart playlist and played that playlist with shuffle mode enabled how would doing that be different than using the same criteria with Play Doctor?

If you've created a smartlist that plays the tracks you want in the order you want, there's no point using Play Doctor. If you don't have or aren't in the mood to select one, you might restrict Play Doctor to, say, one genre, and let it do its thing.

Based on your examples, you're well within the limitations of smartlists. (Don't concern yourself with its limitations. The problem most of us have is we're never quite sure whether an apparent limitation lies with the system or our ability to construct the necessary smartlist.) The easiest way to learn how to use them is to start creating them. You can decide things like what your 'favourites' are as you go (e.g., it might be a combination of [Rating], [Last Played], [Number Plays]). Even when you know what you're doing, the best teacher is the result the smartlist produces.

But then I was unsure if the custom tags are actually stored in the files themselves or just a MC DB thing – which I might not like as I tend to do tag editing outside of MC.

Although I don't see the point, there's nothing wrong with using an external tag editor if that's what you prefer. But restricting the fields you use in MC to those that can be written to file tags in a way that's understood by an external tag editor is a severe and unnecessary restriction. To the extent you have to maintain some compatibility (e.g., your tag editor imports [Rating] from some external source), you can design your use of fields accordingly (e.g., leave [Rating] as is, and use custom [Rating.Borg], [Rating.Borgette] and [Rating.MiniBorg] for user ratings).

[AudioBorg]

Thanks again for the thoughtful and thorough responses.

I think I will start editing tags within MC and use custom tags (as rick.ca suggests) for any additional query parameters I feel I might want.

Although I don't see the point, there's nothing wrong with using an external tag editor if that's what you prefer. But restricting the fields you use in MC to those that can be written to file tags in a way that's understood by an external tag editor is a severe and unnecessary restriction. To the extent you have to maintain some compatibility (e.g., your tag editor imports [Rating] from some external source), you can design your use of fields accordingly (e.g., leave [Rating] as is, and use custom [Rating.Borg], [Rating.Borgette] and [Rating.MiniBorg] for user ratings).

Quite frankly MC is SO good I can't see myself changing to another media player anytime soon so compatibility with any other SW is not now an issue and I don't foresee it being one in the future either.

[wig]

I use a custom field all the time; it's definitely the way to go when you want to fine tune your playlists. I have custom fields for my wife's favorite music, a custom ratings field for myself (1-100), one to identify popular music and several others.

A powerful tool to use in concert with custom fields is the mix operator. You can use it to create a nice blend of music using various tag info.

On tag compatibility; I routinely use my custom tagsin another application by copying them to the Comment field. I use a custom tag with an expression to aggregate the field info I want, then use Tools > Library Tools > Move \Copy Fields to copy this expression to comment field.

Make sure to use descriptive tag info; for example, if you create a custom Single tag, instead of making the acceptable values Yes;No make them Single:No