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[Sangie]

A regular problem I have with Media Center since I started using it is it creating quite a few forms of the same artist. I'd really like a way to set up artist aliases so if something is tagged as one name, it will correct to the main standard tag. It'd also be great if I could get it to ignore capitalization and spaces and hyphens/underscores.

Is there a good way to do it without having to constantly clean my collection?

[blgentry]

Clean, consistent metadata (artist, album, song title, etc) is the key to having a really well organized library.  If your music comes from a variety of sources, you may need to manipulate that metadata a bit when importing it into MC.

When you first import a large collection with "un-clean metadata" there might be a good bit of work to do to fix these kinds of issues.  But once it's done, the work to import a new album is very small.  If you keep doing this incremental metadata correction and cleanup, it's pretty easy to keep it really nicely organized.

I don't think any kind of auto feature exists like you are describing.  It would probably be pretty hard to write a good one.  Or you would have to manually pick these "aliases" for each artist, which is pretty much the same work as fixing them.  Speaking of, let me tell you about how you can fix your artists in ways that you might not already know about.

Let's say you have some albums by Eric Clapton and they have some different layouts like "ERIC CLAPTON", "Eric Clapton", "Clapton, Eric", etc.  You can fix all of these in a single procedure.  The procedure looks something like this:

1.  Go to an albums view (or other view you like) that easily shows the artist name in a way you can easily recognize.
2.  In the search box at the upper right, type in just enough to match all of the variations.  In this case it's probably pretty easy to just type in "clapton" and it will match all of the above variations.  Even if you had "eric_Clapton" it would match that too, because the search ignores case, underscores, etc and does substring matches.
3.  Now you should see all of the variations in question.  Highlight all of the albums with artist spellings that you don't want, like "ERIC CLAPTON".  Also highlight *one* album that shows the correct artist spelling.  In this case that would be "Eric Clapton".  You might want to use the Command key held down to highlight more than one album at once.
4.  Open the tag action window by pressing "Option-Enter".  Or use the menu Edit > Tag .
5.  This tag action window shows you the metadata and lets you edit it.  It also lets you edit many files at one time, in one operation.  When you open it, you will probably see that Artist, Album, and everything else all say "Varies".  That's because they all have different values:  different album names, different song names, even different artist spellings.  So, go to the Artist tag and click on it's value.  You'll see a little dot next to it.  Click on the dot and it will expand out to a list that shows ALL variations of that artist name that you have selected!  Just pull down to the one you like, (Eric Clapton) and select it.

Boom!  You just set that artist name for every album you selected in step 3.

You can use this procedure artist by artist until you have them all fixed up.  Writing it out makes it seem kind of long, but it's really pretty quick.  You can probably do the whole thing in under 20 seconds once you get used to doing it.  You can even skip the step to open the Tag Action Window and just leave it open while you are doing metadata maintenance.

I hope this helps.

Brian.

[Sangie]

Thank you! I'm also sorting art images and some artists change names completely so I wanted old names to be matched to new names but I don't think that's possible. It's not like I can make a database record that artist links to lol. But thanks for your advice on the other items ^^

[RoderickGI]

some artists change names completely

In Brian's step 2, you can include a list of completely different names in the search criteria if you know what all the alias' are. For example, a search such as;

[Artist]=Clapton,[Eric",Baza,"ton]

Means: The Artist Name contains 'Clapton" or begins with 'Eric' or contains 'Baza' or ends with 'ton'.

Be careful of the spaces though, because the following Search Expression;

[Artist]=Clapton, [Eric",Baza,"ton]

Means: The Artist Name contains 'Clapton" and either begins with 'Eric' or contains 'Baza' or ends with 'ton'.

The extra space after 'Clapton,' makes a difference. Most of that is documented in the Wiki here: https://wiki.jriver.com/index.php/Search_Language#Grouping_and_Combining
The same search can also be performed using;
[Artist]=Clapton,([Eric",Baza,"ton])
No space, but the brackets () mean that those criteria get evaluated first, even though they are not first in the list reading left to right, and then the first criteria, 'Clapton' gets evaluated last, and as an OR statement.

Make sure to read all that Wiki article, including the: https://wiki.jriver.com/index.php/Search_Language#Quoting_and_Anchoring

The extra space bit doesn't seem to be documented in the Wiki, but it works.The example in the Wiki;
[Artist]=[Bob Dylan] ([Date (year)]=1969 or [Date (year)]=1997)

can also be expressed, and works identically, to;
[Artist]=[Bob Dylan] [Date (year)]=1969,1997

Neat. But I digress just a little. The point is that you can include a list of all known Alias' in one search, and deal with all the name variations in one go. Knowing how the MC Search Language works just makes it a lot easier.

so I wanted old names to be matched to new names but I don't think that's possible. It's not like I can make a database record that artist links to lol.

You can actually create a List Type field in MC to contain all the Alias' and theoretically you can make that field Relational to the [Artist] field, so that there can be only one set of Alias values for each [Artist] value. But when I did a little testing of that some time back, from memory the List Type caused the Relational status not to work, so updates didn't happen. But you could have a String Type field containing the Alias' just for reference, and it would be updated for all files any time you added a new Alias, if the [Alias] field was Relational to the [Artist] field.

But as Brian says, that is more work than just fixing the problem in the first place.