Seperating my music.

[saddlet...@gmail.com]

Would somebody explain, in simple terms please, how can i keep my comedy cd's and Christmas cd's separate from the main body of my music. I have laid down 25,000 assorted music tracks but don't want Derek & Clive popping up when we have friends round for dinner, nor do i want Christmas songs on when we are having a BBQ! Is there a way to keep them separate and how.

Thanking you in advance,

Tony Bobbett.

[Edward B]

This is also something I would like - separating music from non-music. Plus I would like to separate non-music into separate genre's.

If I could start over from the very beginning I would have maybe labeled everything differently because I didn't think about listening to it in the future rather than hurry up and record as much as possible.

The only other thing I could think of would be make giant playlists but then it would be difficult to find stuff .

[JustAnOrdinaryJoanna]

Without tags, currently it's best managed via playlists.
1. Decide what you don't want to hear at innappropriate times. From your post that is currently comedy & Christmas.
2. Create a playlist for each category that you want to control. Add albums, tracks etc.
3. Create another playlist. I called mine All bar some. You will find an option to append 'All music'via the option 'combine playlists'. Add this category. This adds the whole 'database' of music.
4. Select a 'control' playlist, eg Christmas. Select combine playlists. Then select 'subtract' from and choose your all music playlist. Repeat for any other control playlists.
5. You now have the main full database, a playlist without embarrassing/inopportune tracks, plus dedicated 'speciality' playlists for Christmas/comedy. The Random play still operates on playlists.

I'll re-add Christmas to my All bar some playlist at Christmastime to break overdosing & remove it again after Christmas.

HTH.

[Jasper Warwick]

I also had this problem. My solution was to write a spreadsheet program that auto generates playlists based on the ID3 genre TAG which are then uploaded to the B2.

If you want to give it a try I have attached it to this post. You do need a PC and Excel to run it (it might also run on a mac with the latest version of Excel)

It really has transformed my enjoyment of the B2 I can now browse artists or albums by genre and keeping the playlists up to date is no longer a problem as every couple of months I just re run the scan and it completely rebuilds my playlists.

I did need to spend a few hours sorting out the categorisation of my music but that was no bad thing in the end.

Jasper.

[Dick Cooper]

Hi

I really like the look of the playlist builder spreadsheet, but I have fallen at Step 4 - Build Genre List. Build Artist List works fine - 394 artists from the artist folders that contain the albums. But then Build Genre seems to not work properly - it puts the Artist name from the ID3 tag in both the Genre and Playlist fields (as seen in the Genre worksheet) although the Artist field in that sheet correctly contains the artist name (the name of the folder containing the albums). Screengrab Brennan17.jpg attached.

Genre field is correct as shown by Windows Explorer (Screengrab Explorer.jpg attached) and MP3tag.

I'm using Excel 2003 SP2 and opened the xlsm file using the Microsoft Open xml Converter version 12.0.6500.5000 which seemed to work OK. I've set Macro Security to low to avoid the 'Macros are diabled..." error. 

Has the converter done something odd to the macro perhaps? Anyone else using this set of software or seen this problem?

Thanks

[Jasper Warwick]

Hi,

I just did a quick test on my system and it has worked correctly, it looks like it is mistaking the genre for the album. Could you check "10,000 Maniacs" and see if it has Genre set correctly.

Jasper.

[Dick Cooper]

Hi Jasper

I think it's putting the artist name in the Genre field (see attachments)

I'm sure it's something my obsolete software has done, but I can't quite see why or how to fix it... maybe I need to tinker with the macro?

Dick
p.s. Sorry for delay - went away for the day

[Jasper Warwick]

Hi Dick

Thanks for the screenshots, there is nothing wrong with your files so it must be my software that is reading the wrong ID3 tag (odd that it works with my music but not yours) leave it with me and I will see if there is a better way of reading the genre from the music file. I will then upload a new spreadsheet (hopefully today).

Jasper.

[Dick Cooper]

OK, thanks. There's no hurry, this is a long term project... my music is fine on my B2, it's just not very well organised.

According to MP3tag all the tags are ID3v2.3 (I used MP3tag to embed album art among other things).

Please remember I'm using obsolete software - Excel 2003 on XP Professional SP3. I have access to a Windows 10 machine but it doesn't have Excel, only OpenOffice, which I think needs a Java runtime environment to run macros (not really sure what I'm talking about there).

[Jasper Warwick]

Attached is a new version of the spreadsheet. I think the problem was that (for some reason) the genre tag was in a different position on your files. The sheet has a test facility to read all the tags of an album in order to identify the offset for the genre field. Run this on one of your albums then locate the line that the genre tag is on and up date the offset then re run the system and it should (famous last words) work. The problem is likely to be because I am not using the most sensible mechanism for reading the genre field but I can't find a better method so decided on this fix.

[Dick Cooper]

Hi Jasper

YES! Thank you, my offset is 12... and the Spreadsheet now works as documented.

Now for the checking part, and the summoning of courage to delete all my old (incomplete) playlists (some with Genre names) from my B2 and add the new (complete) ones. That may take some time. It all looks prefect so far, though.

Thanks again,
Dick

[Dick Cooper]

... I meant perfect ...

[Jasper Warwick]

You probably should export your old play lists first then, if it all goes horribly wrong you can always reload them.

[Dick Cooper]

Hi Jasper

I notice that my old (exported) playlist files named for example "Country" contain elements containing "/artist/album", whereas the playlist files created by your spreadsheet named "Country" have elements containing "/artist", and extra playlist files named for example "Album-Country" contain the "/artist/album" elements.

This looks interesting, but is not explained in the spreadsheet help. As I have indeed exported my old playlists, I will have a go at loading the playlists created by the spreadsheet to find out what happens. Maybe tomorrow if I'm feeling reckless. What can possibly go wrong? (old programmer's motto). I only have 30 genres so deleting any spurious playlists won't take too long.

Cheers again

[Dick Cooper]

Hi again

Now I see what those other playlists are for. You might want to add something about them into the Playlist builder documentation. It's an most excellent extra feature, although the fact that the albums in the album-genre playlists appear in artist+album sequence looks a bit weird (because I can't see the artist names as they're not in the album name - although I could change that). Would sorting the records (in the finished Albums worksheet) by the Album column before running Export Playlist solve this? I tried this and Export Playlist ran OK, and the resulting album-genre files look OK (mmmmaybe) but I have this uneasy feeling that this might create a mountain of poo if loaded onto the B2. Thoughts?

A separate topic: Those extra playlists mean I breached the 60 playlists limit because I have 28 genres x2 = 56 playlists plus the 7 colours = 63. I have deleted a few that I didn't really need, so no problem. The 60 limit is only partly a limit (you can load more but the GUI only displays the first 60, as I just discovered). I have documented this strange feature in the Genre forum.

Anyway, thanks again,
DC

[Jasper Warwick]

What I do is to group genres into playlists So than "Dance", "Disco", "Electro", Pop all get grouped under the "Pop" play list, this cuts down the number of play lists from about 60 to 20. You can also exclude a play list from being created by putting an X in the top row. See my original sheet (before you deleted everything) for how this works.

Good point about the album sorting. I will fix that ASAP. 

If you end up with more than 30 play lists then I think that is too many.

I did suggest to Martin the ability to nest playlists which would solve the problem. I even cam up with a mock up of how it might work.

Jasper.

[Jasper Warwick]

I have update the spreadsheet so that it now sorts album playlists by album name not artist/album as was the case before.

[Dick Cooper]

Many thanks for the new spreadsheet.

Yes, more than 30 playlists is probably too many. However, for me, Genre is the most helpful way of grouping the music into groups that I might want to hear together. Hence, more than 20 or 30 artists in one Genre is too many (except for the Genre "singles" which is a bucket for artists with one or two single tracks).

And nesting would be nice.

Well, anyway, so I was thinking that if I fooled the spreadsheet into thinking the Genre field is where the Year field really is, I could create more playlists called 1956, 1957, 1958 ... 2018 containing all the albums released that year. Now that would be neat, except I would have more than 60 playlists again...

So I'm going a little crazy now and I'm going to go and lie down until the desire to create more playlists recedes. That's all for now.

Thanks again.

[Jasper Warwick]

I seen no reason why you could not use year instead of genre to group data. You could then group 1970,1971... etc. into a group "70s Music". The trick with the spreadsheet is to use the ability to group genres into a few number of playlists.