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Support => Tips and Tricks => Topic started by: Bee-liever on January 13, 2020, 07:47:40 AM

Title: Creating an Album Play Count custom tag
Post by: Bee-liever on January 13, 2020, 07:47:40 AM
Creating an Album Play Count custom tag to give similar results to Overall Top Albums in Last.FM statistics

As promised to boroda and Zak

With reference to original posts here: https://getmusicbee.com/forum/index.php?topic=29176.0 (https://getmusicbee.com/forum/index.php?topic=29176.0)
                                                 and here: https://getmusicbee.com/forum/index.php?topic=29247.0 (https://getmusicbee.com/forum/index.php?topic=29247.0)

After some discussion (and much thought) on having an Album Play Count tag that could be used to play most played albums in Auto-DJ mode, I worked out that a simple average of track play counts won't do.  It is too easily thrown off by a single favourite track from an Album being played multiple times.

With more research I found a Manipulated-Mean Album Play Count (MAPC) gives results comparable to Overall Top Albums from Last.FM.

Prerequisites

Minimum:

*I have 'files for each album are organised in their own folder' enabled.

Method

1. Set up a Custom tag 'MAPC'

2. Set up Virtual tags

3. set up first ALR

5. set up second ALR

6. set ALR's to auto-run at start up

If both ALR's ran successfully then;

Optional

If you want to have manual control on applying the MAPC values then you need to set up an ASR preset.

You can now run the ASR preset to update an albums MAPC tag on demand.

_______________________________________________________________________

 
My library is just over 25,000 tracks and I found that running the ALR on every start is a bit over-kill, so I only run the presets monthly.

I couldn't get 'Calculate aggregated functions and save them to tags for ticked presets on every XX tag changes' to work consistently for me.
You may have better luck.

With the way my library is structured <Album unique Id>, <File path> and <Folder>, within Auto Library Reports options, would also not work for me.
Feel free to try these options with your set up and please post your results.
If these options work you won't need the Path4ALR virtual tag, and freeing up a virtual tag is always something to be desired.


Happy MB-ing everyone!  :)
Title: Re: Creating an Album Play Count custom tag
Post by: SonicRings on March 04, 2021, 03:54:00 AM
Thanks a lot for your tutorial! However, I'm confused why it's necessary to go through all of this when MusicBee clearly already keeps track of the album play count total?

(https://i.imgur.com/2rp9Nfe.png)

Is there a way to reference this value, which is visible when editing an album?
It's also an available stat in the Library Statistics window:

(https://i.imgur.com/zsKwJtu.png)
Title: Re: Creating an Album Play Count custom tag
Post by: Pingaware on March 05, 2021, 09:58:39 PM
Bee-liever, you are a star. I've been thinking about this for literally years. At one point I was planning on coding a plugin to do numerical functions directly just to do this more easily (laziness and real life got in the way of that...). I even had a similar setup to work out if an album was unplayed in its entirety which was imperfect to say the least. I will find time to try this one day soon.