Print

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

[reian]

hello,

I was wondering how everyone else is managing their music collection with media jukebox.  

I have a pretty big collectrion of mp3s - Im halfway through my 120gig drive.  

Within one library, I have so many artists, in different genres.  

I understand media jukbox has organizing schemes, but I havent found a good way to make it work for me.  

Most of my music breaks down to electronic, brazilian, and jazz.  

Ive tried the various organizing schemes, but nothing really works.  

Ideally Id like to have within the same library a category for electronic music, with all electronic artists, then brazilian, and so on.

This is more difficult than MJ describes.  I tried adding new scheme, with "artist" as component, then search criteria as "electronic" - but I only get a handful of what I want in there.  There are many other electronic tracks under different sub genre names.  

Im kind of stumped now.  Ive considered having a different library for the large genres I have - for example electronic and acoustic, by importing all and deleting the irrelevant.  

Anyway, any info or tips regarding organization will be so much appreciated.  

Also, on a different note, I have all my mp3s on a USB HD.  How would I keep the library prefs when on different computers?

thanks,

anrei d

[ChicoSelfs]

Why don't you in "Genre" put electronic or something else? Right click on a file --> Properties and change genre

[reian]

right, but that would require changing the genre in the properties for all the files!  Many already have some sort of genre tagged - it might be electronic music, but the genre tag is techno, acid jazz, a bunch of different sub genres.  

Can you manually add artists after making a scheme under genre?

[reian]

Some more Qs...

Do people using MJ correct the genre field in properties quite regularly?

And is it possible to select multiple genres under one sheme...

I suppose one thing that makes a difference is that I download a lot of songs from kazaa, so the naming of title and such is not always up to me.  I do have to go in there and correct some stuff in properties.  I just found out about "fill properties from file name" - this is very helpful.  

[wortgames]

Yup I regularly change the 'genre' field to suit my opinion, not that of the first person to register the disc with CDDB or whatever.

Because I am constantly adding tracks, I just break all my music down into about 10 genres, some with 'sub-genres', eg: Blues; Folk; Rock/Pop; Rock/Heavy Metal; etc.

This way I just compile a new playlist each time I play, by multi-selecting just those genres I feel like listening to on the day.

Example, I might choose to mix 'Rock/Pop' with Blues one day, but with the Heavy Metal another day. All my electronic stuff is split into 'Electronic' (which is upbeat, mostly Ozric Tentacles) and 'Ambient' which is all my zen/yoga/incense stuff. I tend not to mix these genres with the others.

Changing the genres is not so hard, you can organise by artist and multi-select as many files as you like and right-click to change all the genres in one go, this is one of the great things about MJ.

One tip - when choosing your genre names, spare a thought for how they will alphabetize when you organise your whole library by genre, this way you can make it easier to multi-select 2 or 3 genres at the same time.

Good luck!

[gkerber]

Genre is not really useful to me.  Too much of a stick in the stand for the files.

What I'd really like is the ability to set ONE MORE MORE genre's against a track.

That way the track can co-exist in more than one genre.  Presto, managing my files is easy.

Some music simply belongs in more than one genre.

[Markeau]

I seem to be doing pretty well using my own Genre's like:
Rock Alternative
Rock Classic
Rock Pop
Rock Hard
Rock Techno
House Hard
House Progressive
House Club
House Acid
etc
... but I agree it would be nice to be able to categorize Genre's using multiple keys like a relational database could do.

[nila]

You guys who want more than one genre should just use one of the custom fields and set it to be Genre 2. Then just use that to do the grouping.

This would especially work for reian to solve his problem.
Use the custom field and put all the electronic songs with an appropriate custom 2 tags etc.

[gkerber]

That would help, but not give me the control I want.

Consider some Eric Clapton music.  It should be in rock and blues genres.  Can't be done in MJ right now.

I should be able to say play "blues" and get those Eric Clapton songs, and get them if I say play "rock".  

I'm not saying this would be easy to program or create an easy to use UI, but it would make genre useful to me.

Right now, I simply leave that field blank, it has no use to me.

[wortgames]

I totally agree that multiple genre fields would be better. However I think I might have found another way to do something similar with the current format:

1. Create a blank playlist for every genre you have
2. Select or multi-select a bunch of similar tracks
3. Right-click and select properties then playlists
4. Tick all those 'playlists' (genres) that apply for those tracks

When you want to play, you can easily play just the one genre/playlist (obviously) or by right-clicking each genre/playlist you can send the whole list to 'playing now' or to a new playlist to create a mixture of genres.

The other good thing about doing it this way is that for eg your soundtracks can still have 'soundtrack' as the official genre but you can assign each track to whatever genres you want.

A nice touch to this would be if MJ could display 'playlists' columns which the user can simply check/uncheck to add/remove tracks to playlists. Come to think of it, it would be nice if ALL that right-click info (playlists, associated image etc) could be displayed in the columns...

[gkerber]

Yeah, that would work!  Good idea thanks.  A little difficult to maintain, but workable.

[Markeau]

That would help, but not give me the control I want.

Consider some Eric Clapton music.  It should be in rock and blues genres.  Can't be done in MJ right now.

I should be able to say play "blues" and get those Eric Clapton songs, and get them if I say play "rock".  

I'm not saying this would be easy to program or create an easy to use UI, but it would make genre useful to me.

Right now, I simply leave that field blank, it has no use to me.

If you have the Genre on a track set to "Rock Blues" then an Edit > Quick Search can be done for all tracks with Genre "Blues" and it will find those labeled "Rock Blues"

[michel]

I should be able to say play "blues" and get those Eric Clapton songs, and get them if I say play "rock".

Please read this thread for a possible solution:

http://www.musicex.com/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.cgi?board=beta;action=display;num=1034025666

You can apply this solution directly to the 'genre' field if you prefer.