Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Madame Joy]

Hello
I'm currently using the free trial so very new to JRiver MC, I hope someone can help.  I am only using it for audio so my question relates only to audio files and ID3v2.3 and FLAC tags.

I cannot understand how JRiver is reading the tags in the 'artist' field or how it chooses to display records based on the tags in this field.  Specifically where individual files are tagged with more than one artist as a 'split-value' tag.

I have a few albums where I have two or three artists in the artist field, as a multiple or split value field/tag.  For example I have tagged some of my Rolling Stones albums with Rolling Stones and Mick Taylor as separate tags in the 'artist' tag field in all tracks. I also have Stones albums where the artist is just Rolling Stones and Mick Taylor albums where the only artist tag is MT.  So, what I expect to see when I look under Mick Taylor is all his albums and also all the Stones albums he is on. And of course likewise when looking under Rolling Stones - all the Stones albums with and without MT.

This works in other systems but not JRiver.  MC only displays the albums under Rolling Stones and ignores the second (Mick Taylor) tag.  Why?  And the next question is: is there anything I can do to get MC to simply read and display tag information straightforwardly?

I have tried putting both names as separate tags in the 'Album Artist' as well but still get the same result.

I hope I've explained this clearly.  I've looked in the forum for answers and I've read some posts dealing with compilation albums and the Multiple Artists thing which MC uses but I cannot find this issue dealt with anywhere.  I hope I haven't missed anything and apologise if I have.

Thanks in advance for your help.

Dave

[Arindelle]

Hi -- JRiver can do what you want and IMHO does it better than anything out there.

In the mean time, note that the principal separator which allows you to have more than one artist per track is the semicolon. So if "Rolling Stones; Mick Taylor" is entered in the ARTIST field you will be able to break them out (with another trick which I or someone else can show you later. Bear in mind that the ALBUMARTIST field is where most views will be grouped around -- this is a choice to be made which should be consistant with subsequent tagging. But in your example its pretty simple - The AlbumArtist would be either Rolling Stones OR Mitch Taylor. Searching on the artist field would bring up all of Mitch Taylor and the Stones albums.

So for the albumartist tag you have some choices --- with rock its a little less important, but with Jazz this can get messy - so I use the soloist field. Sometimes the side men are as interesting to find as the leader/group name 

As an Example ...

AlbumArtist : Sonny Rollins

Artist : Sonny Rollins
          John Coltrane
 
Soloists:
Sonny Rollins - Sax (Tenor)
John Coltrane - Sax (Tenor)
Paul Chambers - Bass
Philly Joe Jones - Drums
Red Garland - Piano

so if I search for John Coltrane I will get all his albums; all albums he appeared as a primary artist and all albums he played on as part of a group.

So if you do this with the Stones and Mick Taylor, your going to have to do it for Brian Jones and maybe you get a Bill Wyman solo album etc.

The key thing is to think it through a bit so its consistent, then you can get anything you want.

I can post a how-to in a screen shot if you give me some feedback how you want to organize your collection... basically you need to create or modify fields to be list fields (delimited by the semicolon) rather than a text field.  .. This is also very handy to tag because it gives you list boxes, removing the ";" from view. So do you need to split artists? ... yes. Ok, how about albumartists and soloists or anything else??

It sounds complicated but afterwards you really have a lot of power under the hood to organize and reorganize if you change your mind.

welcome btw

[Madame Joy]

Hi Arindelle

Thanks a lot for taking the time to help me with this, I really do appreciate it. 

I forgot to say before: I have the artist field filled in with different artists separated by a semi-colon (in the type of albums I'm talking about).  (Also, in case it's relevant, my tags are nearly all done with the MP3Tag program.)

I think what I'm trying to do is quite straightforward.  I want to tag some albums with two (or more) artists.  I want those albums to be displayed under each artist.  So in the example I gave
I want to be able to display by Artist and under Rolling Stones I expect to see ALL the Stones albums but no-one else's.  Under Mick Taylor I want to see Mick Taylor's solo albums AND some but not all of the Stones' albums (obviously just the ones with MT playing).  Should be simple, no?

In these type of albums I deliberately don't fill in the Album Artist field because I don't want the album to display under only one artist (or 'Various Artists' or 'Rolling Stones & Mick Taylor' or the bizarre 'Multiple Artists').

Maybe a better example to show what I mean is to use a particular album, its titled 'Waterson: Carthy'.  It's an album on which there are 3 artists I want to have in the display: Eliza Carthy, Martin Carthy and Norma Waterson.  I've attached 3 screenshots of the display.  In jrmc1 you can see there is no entry at all for Martin Carthy, in jrmc2 you can see the album displayed under Norma Waterson and in jrmc3 you can see the album tags and see that I have tagged this album with all 3 artists (separated by a semi-colon but that doesn't show).

As I said I would like to know what is going on here and why MC won't display using the tags in the file.  I appreciate that this is the sort of nitpicking stuff which most people don't care about - but, what can I say, I do.  I like the look of MC very much and would like to make it my main audio player but at the moment I can't understand what it's doing with the tags and that is important to me.

Many, many thanks for your help.

Dave

[MrC]

Start by customizing the view, and replacing the Artist library field in the view with the expression:

   [Artist]&datatype=[list]

You can just select Artist in the view and hit Edit, and change the type.

[Madame Joy]

Thanks Mr C. 
Can you give me an idiot's step-by-step guide to doing this?  I tried doing it as follows but it made no difference...

In the main screen, in the top left hand pane: - Right clicked Artist > select Customize view > selected Add > select under Type Expression >  pasted your text into the box headed Expression to group by > clicked OK > clicked OK > Saved as new view.

Back in the main screen I then selected my new view Artists Copy.  Sadly I couldn't see any difference.  Tried restarting the program but with no effect. 

I hope the above gives you enough information to see what I tried and you can now tell me what I should do.

Many thanks for your help.

Dave

[MrC]

If you customized the Artist view, the two default categories there are Album Artist (auto) followed by Album.  You'd want to select Album Artist (auto) and hit Edit, not Add.  If you Add, you get yet another category, which is fine, so long as you make it the first category by moving it up to the top.

[Madame Joy]

OK, got it. Thanks.

I tried that but what I now see displayed is every single artist - it now ignores the Album Artist completely so all the artists in my compilation albums with an Album Artist tag of Various Artists are displayed.  That's not what I was hoping for.

Thanks your help (and patience) is much appreciated.

[MrC]

You're going to have to think this through...

Artist is a list.  There can be one or more values in an Artist.

Album Artist is a single value for an album.  There is only one value.  However, you can fake a list by assigning multiple values separated by semicolons, and you have to cast this to a list type of you do.

Album Artist (auto) is typically what is used in views to automatically provide either Album Artist (when set) or Artist otherwise, and when Artist varies across tracks the string "(Multiple Artists)" is output instead.  But it also considers only the first item in the list for comparisons sake.  So if you have some tracks in a Rolling Stones album tagged with Rolling Stones; Mick Taylor" and some with only "Rolling Stones" MC will not consider this a multiple artists album, and will output only Rolling Stones.  But Mick Taylor is not output.  To get Mick Taylor output, you have to either use the Artist field (but this gets you too many artists), or have to add Mick Taylor to Album Artist and use Album Artist or Album Artist (auto) in the view cast as a list using &datatype=[list].

An alternate solution is to create a new field, something like Additional Artists, defined as a list type, and add Mick Taylor, etc. there.  Then your view can show Album Artist (auto) as well as Additional Artists via expression:

   [Album Artist (auto)];[Additional Artists]&datatype=[list]

[Madame Joy]

Thank you, that's a very helpful and considerate answer.  If I've understood right the program - as initially set up - will not display more than one value in the Artist field.  If there is more than one value it makes a decision on which of the values it will 'output'.

I will have a go at your alternative suggestions when I get a chance and let you know if they produce the result I'm after (though if it means re-tagging everything with a new field I think I may not go any further).

Thanks again.
Dave

[MrC]

Just to clarify the "Artist Field".  When you select Album Artist (auto) from the category list in the view, the header will show Artist, and while appropriate for reading, it can be confusing to folks who don't know there's a difference.

Album Artist (auto) won't show all entries in the list; by default, it shows only the first entry from Artist (when Album Artist is empty).

Artist will.  That's because the two are of different types, and different types are treated differently in views.  You can read more about this here:

   http://wiki.jriver.com/index.php/Expression_Language#Data_Types

[vagskal]

You could try out a panes view instead and have an Album Artist and an Artist column. If you select from the Album Artist column you will only get the albums to which you have assigned the selected artist as Album Artist, and if you select from the Artist column you will get every song where the selected artist is an Artist.

It is not necessary to re-tag your music files. You can just set up additional MC fields that are kept in the MC database and not written to the music files.