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[WheelToTheStorm]

Every time I look into the expression language my head starts spinning. I'm not the brightest bulb in the chandelier, hoping someone can help me out.

I would like to be able to put a clickable link in a field. ie. [poster] file://M:\Audio\Archives\gd1970-02-14\poster.jpg

Associating with album name, date, etc. (which displays with whatever tag you prefer) does not work for me as I use custom fields that I group by [ShowID] then sort by [SourceID] and in my library view the poster will show a separate [SourceID] not good, bla, bla, bla. Just suffice it to say that I need a link (not to tag it to the [Album] or any other tag) I need it separate.

If creating a field with a clickable link is not possible, then perhaps someone could run me through making a global "to local file" link in the MC links area in upper right.

[MrC]

What are you ultimately trying to do - open the poster's folder in Explorer?  Show the poster?

There are no click-able field links like you're hoping for, but an expression can certainly generate a valid Windows file URL, which can be opened in Explorer.  The Links feature can open a folder or file on the local file system.

Are your posters imported into MC?  If not, what is the exact relationship between your poster and some other item that is imported into MC (I mean on field-by-field level).

[WheelToTheStorm]

I have a library view that is a categories view. In the customize view pop-up the "show categories in this order" is my user field [ShowID]. This field is only used for live recordings. an example of the field [ShowID] would be "1989-10-09  Rhoades Coliseum - Hampton, VA". The field is designed in this form as it assigns the recording/album to the date and the venue. The result is a nice list of the shows in order of date. You double click the show and the file view pane shows the individual files (songs) played that night, due to [ShowID] being a file level tag. The file view pane is sorted in order of Set and Track#. Now for the posters they are all imported into MC and if I assign the [ShowID] tag to the poster it will also show in the file view pane. So that's nice and easy and displays basically the setlist and that nights poster right there in the file view pane. However this causes a bigger problem for me where I have to figure a run around that doesn't use any tag ie.[ShowID] [Date] etc. that the audio file uses. Here's the problem, any given night/show may have different sources that are recorded. There might be a soundboard and/or an audience recording, and now a days maybe a video recording of the show. For example the above 1989-10-09 show in Hampton has a Soundboard and and Audience recording. I have an additional user field [SourceID] (also on file level) which identifies the source of the show. Using 1989-10-09 as an example:

[ShowID]   = 1989-10-09  Rhoades Coliseum - Hampton, VA.  tag for all three recordings
[SourceID] = gd1989-10-09_sbd.flac16  tag for soundboard recording
[SourceID] = gd1989-10-09_aud.cmc67.flac16  tag for audience recording
[SourceID] = pf1989-10-09_sbd.flac16 (see below)

Source tags are fashioned after etree.org naming standards for live recordings and always start with the artist abbreviation. this allows for the night at the Hampton Coliseum to be all under the [ShowID] while allowing for different sources as well as different artists playing the same night at the same venue as the third source above is an example. So back to the library view sorted by [ShowID]. So the fields I have showing in the views columns are [Date] [Venue-City,State] [SourceID] [Quality] [ShowNotes] [etc]. The column SourceID will say "Varies" when there are more that one source. That makes a nice way to to at first glance know I have more than one source for that show. You double click and the file view pops up with the songs in order but is also grouped by the [SourceID]. Makes for a nice presentation, separates the sources but leaves the nights show intact. Now if I assign the poster to the [Date] or the [ShowID] it will also show up in the file view pane but it will also cause the [SourceID] to register "varies" when perhaps I don't have multiple sources but because the audio files have [SourceID] gd1989-10-09_sbd,flac16 and the poster [SourceID] is blank it registers as another SourceID thus defeating the whole purpose of having this field and being able to see if there are multiple sources with one glance. Now you may say just assign it to the [ShowID] and one of the sourceid's that one of the sources have, but that doesn't work either because some posters cover a multiple night run and it would be nice to only have one file instead of copies of the same file for all the nights involved [ShowID]'s involved.

So there it is, I hope I made sense. Basically if I tag the poster with any tag that the audio files have, it shows up along with the audio files which is beautiful but seriously messes up the [SourceID] field as it registers another source when there may not be a second source. That's a big enough violation that the posters won't be included if I can't get this resolved. To tie with using [Date] messes up with another artist in a different venue on the same date. Using [ShowID] messes up when it's a three night stand poster and I need to assign it to the three different nights. Tieing to the [ShowID] works if I have three copies of the same poster each assigned to it's own night, but that is sloppy.

So I was looking for the ability to create a field at file level that I could put a clickable link in like "file://M:\Audio\Archives\gd1989-10-09_sbd.flac16\poster.jpg" and you could click on it and it would show the poster. That would be the best way for my setup, however I imagine I could somehow get it to do that by adding a global link (the ones in the upper right that lookup the artist in wikipedia for example) and call it poster and have it show for anything that is displaying that's [ShowID] is not empty.

Thanks for the response and I hope you can figure out my incoherent babbling above. it sounds like I may have to go with a field [poster] and the mc links feature reading that field and displaying the file, if that's the case it's disappointing but workable, need help with the command though

[MrC]

Create a field to assign the poster's path.  Let's call it Poster Path.  For your posters, set the value to the full path, for example:

   M:\Audio\Archives\gd1989-10-09_sbd.flac16\poster.jpg

Now create a new Link, maybe give it the Display name of Posters.  You can leave the Base URL empty.  As the Search URL, use:

    file://////replace([Poster Path], //, ////)

and set the Action to Open in external browser.

Now you can select any file that has Poster Path defined, click the Posters link, and it will open using your systems handler for that file type (probably MC, or maybe even Windows Photo Viewer.

There are probably other ways to handle posters, like placing your posters one level above their corresponding shows, or using sym links (or shortcus to avoid duplication), but we can discuss more options if the Links idea doesn't work to your liking.

btw. somewhere in the forum here is a script I wrote to parse etree info files to help you fill in your MC fields, and convert shn to flac.  Have a look for it, if it might help you (search etree).  I'm happy to make any necessary changes.

[WheelToTheStorm]

Works well, added the "[Poster Path] is not empty" for the search criteria, so it only shows up for files that have posters for, so nice, thank you very much for the expression code file://////replace([Poster Path], //, ////).....

I think I can live with this, in fact as the clock ticks, I'm growing fond of throwing it up there with Artist, Bio, Lyrics. It will also work across different library views automatically (instead of adding the [Poster] column for every view, like I was originally thinking), so that's a good thing.

Thank You, I've noticed your very knowledgeable about this stuff, and seems like your not only at the top of the game here at JRiver, but sounds like etree as well if your parsing info files, WOW, very nice. Brings back memories of receiving a vine in the mail, and having to get pleasurably busy copying. On the comedy side, and you being familiar with etree, the [SourceID] example below is gd1989-10-09 and pf1989-10-09 to show multiple artists, That would be Formerly The Warlocks (Grateful Dead) and Pink Floyd, but Pink Floyd would have to play like circa`69, for that matter so would the Dead, so gd/pf1969-11-08, yeah that would be a good night. Thanks again!     

 

[MrC]

You're welcome.

One of the sub-scripts I wrote for the etree script was to pull the full artist name from the abbreviation.   I'm sure I'm not as familiar with etree as others, but I learned enough to write the processing script.