Messages

16

Questions / Why does MB convert custom id3 tags to all-capitals?

« on: February 02, 2017, 06:58:25 PM »

Is there a specific reason why MB convert custom id3 tags to all-capitals?

I’m currently having troubles of consistency because of this. I use several custom tags sourced from MusicBrainz Picard, but each time I edit any tag in MB all these are converted to all-caps, so if then I try to update my tags with Picard, they are not recognized and are written again in mixed-case, and then MB read them as a split tag (one, the old all-caps, and another, the newly written mixed-caps). So I end up with something like this.



This is very annoying to me.

You can use mixed-caps custom tags in every(?) other tag format, so, why can’t you with id3? It doesn’t seem to be part of the standard (neither for v2.3 or v2.4).

I would like to know if there’s a reason before making a petition for this to change.

17

MusicBee Wishlist / Move the placement of highlight in Album Covers view

« on: November 29, 2016, 03:09:22 PM »

Hello everyone:

Just a little suggestion regarding the highlight field while in Album Covers view. If you display the rating, then the highlight will show at the left of it. This is not a problem if you have all your tracks rated:



But if you don’t, it would look a little strange:



So, I suggest to change the placement of the highlight column to the right of the rating one (or to the left of the track number) (which I would personally prefer) or to align the highlight column to the left if even one song is rated, so they remain visually consistent.

That’s all, thanks for your attention.

18

Questions / Re: Limit the amount of space used in a portable device

« on: August 12, 2016, 06:41:50 PM »

I did think of that. Unfortunately, around 80-85% of my library is in FLAC, and I want mp3s in my device.

19

Questions / Re: trouble adding multiple genres

« on: August 10, 2016, 09:40:30 PM »

I'm guessing that's because last.fm (the source of the genre tag) doesn't have more than one tag that qualifies as genre. You can tag your song manually or add a tag to the song in last.fm directly, then auto tag again. Also check your “genre filter” to add some tags that may be in last.fm, but MB doesn't recognize as genres.

20

Questions / Limit the amount of space used in a portable device

« on: August 10, 2016, 09:24:53 PM »

I have a phone and I'd like to randomly “fill it”, but don't want to use all my storage with music. Is there a way to tell MB to only take a certain amount of GB when doing this?

21

Questions / Re: Filter library by songs not on a certain playlist

« on: June 17, 2016, 07:14:04 PM »

Man, I don’t know how I missed that.

Thank you.

22

Questions / Filter library by songs not on a certain playlist

« on: June 17, 2016, 02:49:14 AM »

I wonder if there’s a way to create a filter for the library (or a playlist that includes every track on the library and…) that excludes only the songs in a certain playlist.

I have a playlist with the sole purpose to put in there the albums that I want to transfer to my portable device. I would like to view which albums are not in that playlist (and therefore neither on my iPod) so I can add new albums without check everytime if they are alredy there, or have to deal with the duplicate dialogue (sometimes there are live or alternate versions that may seem duplicates, but aren't).

Thanks in advance.

23

Questions / Re: «fields to define an album» not working properly

« on: June 07, 2016, 08:14:08 PM »

@redwing: Yes, that might be the case. Although, as I have being able to find a workaround also involving virtual tags, forbid them for album grouping wouldn't be ideal for me.

@ssri: My problem is how to deal with duplicate songs within an album. Like, I have an album in its respective artist folder. But then I have a folder with a compilation of songs (based, for example, on The RS 500 Greatest Songs of All Time). So, I have the album Nevermind in my Nirvana folder, and again the song “Smells Like Teen Spirit” in my RS 500s folder. So MB will put both of them as track one of the Nevermind album, effectively duplicating the song.

I'm aware of the subgrouping headers, and I used that (sorting those list songs last with their own subheading) but if you right click the album to play it or to edit it, replay gain, or send it to playlist, it will affect both the album song and the list-song, which I will to avoid, hence my resort to the album grouping setting. I hope I can explain myself; english is not my first language.

Note: I tagged list-songs with its single release (instead of the album), whenever possible, but not always have the info, or not were released as singles, etc. Also, tagging the list as one album is not an option since I'd like to retain the acurate album info for those not duplicated, which are the most.

24

Questions / Re: «fields to define an album» not working properly

« on: June 02, 2016, 06:27:00 PM »

I did what you suggested, and, indeed, they are grouped in the same album and are not affected by the sorting or grouping of the view. The conditionals only pertain to the <Grouping> tag (which is a string field), and, as I metioned earlier, have the expected values.

Digging a little more, I created a new virtual tag <LV> that simply translate the numeric value in <¿Lista, Vinil-r?> (1, 2, 3) into a string value ("A", "B", "C"), and this new tag works every time. I tried to change the configuration of <¿Lista, Vinil-r?> from numeric to string, but MB doesn't allow me to.

Then I changed the definition of <¿Lista, Vinil-r?> to be "A", "B", "C" from start (and make sure that it were considered as string in its configuration) and it was the same as always: It worked just for some <Album Artist>s (the same as before). So I changed the name of <¿Lista, Vinil-r?> to <ListaVinil>, and it was the same, erratic behaviour. I even changed the corresponding virtual tag position (from virtualtag8 to virtualtag14) to no avail.

I think this may be a bug. For what is worth, this is the definition of the virtual tag in question (formerly, "B" was 2; "A", 1; and "a", 0).

Code

$If($Left(<Grouping>,3)="[L]",B,$If($Left(<Grouping>,3)="[C]",B,$If($Left(<Disc Subtitle>,1)="_",A,a)))

25

Questions / Re: «fields to define an album» not working properly

« on: June 01, 2016, 09:19:26 PM »

Thanks for the response.

I'm not sure what you're suggesting, I think the sorting and grouping settings were global. However, this issue occurs in all views (except track details, of course). The thing is, in theory, no matter what the other tags are, if the values on a field selected as “to define an album” are different, then those tracks must be grouped separately. Am I understanding this right, or are there other factors involved?

If this help, my virtual tag <¿Lista, Vinil-r?> has a numeric value, which is assigned by reading the first three characters of the tag <Grouping>, and a series of conditionals depending on its content. The tag <¿Lista, Vinil-r?> has its values as expected (the highlighted column in the above images), yet, they remain grouped together.

Now, I've looked with more detail and it seems that for some <Album Artist> it works every time (Radiohead, Blur, Beastie Boys), and for others (the most) it never works (Rage Against the Machine, Garbage, Beck, Korn, Sonic Youth), as far as I can tell, tough I haven't looked to all of the relevant artists… (The songs that I’m trying to exclude, belong to a 90s compilation, and I don’t want to have duplicated songs for those albums I have separately).

26

Questions / «fields to define an album» not working properly

« on: June 01, 2016, 03:18:10 AM »

I have a virtual tag that I wanted to use to define an album, so I edite the settings; the problem is, it works with some albums and not others, and I don't know why.

This image shows it working as expected, grouping otherwise identical <Album Artist> and <Album> tags (the <Disc Subtitle> tag is empty).



But in this other album, it simply doesn't work, even though the corresponding column shows that MB recognizes the difference that should be grouping them separately.



Any idea of how to work this out? Is it maybe a bug?

27

Questions / Re: MB takes ENSEMBLE to mean Album Artist, How can I prevent this?

« on: February 06, 2016, 10:39:04 PM »

Thanks, ssri, a custom tag cleared out the confusion indeed.

I'm pretty rigorous when dealing with tags. Almost the entirety of my collection is tagged with Picard (the official tagger for MusicBrainz) and I agree with most of their conventions. Great part of my love for MB is because it let me use various tags to customize my collection.

Something similar occurred with the tag PERFORMER (MB included it as <Artist>, but Picard use it to annotate the musician credits (violinist, drummer, bass, orchestra, vocals, chorus, etc.)), but in that case I was able to correct it by modifying the file Configuration.xml in the installation folder, and map it to the <Musician Credits List> Vorbis-tag for MB. I had tried the same in this case, but, for this to work, I had to deal with the PERFORMER problem again, and it doesn't seem that ENSEMBLE can be mapped to any other MB tag in this file.

I have modified Configuration.xml to map other vorbis tags from Picard to MB standards (i.e <Media Type> = MEDIA, <Original Year> = ORIGINALDATE, <Set Subtitle> = DISCSUBTITLE). Maybe we should make a petition in the wishlist forum to have an easy way to map Vorbis tags (since there is no standard for Vorbis).

28

Questions / MB takes ENSEMBLE to mean Album Artist, How can I prevent this?

« on: February 05, 2016, 07:31:48 PM »

It seems that, when dealing with FLAC (Vorbis) tags, MB assumes that ENSEMBLE means ALBUM ARTIST.

Here’s the problem: You may have (as I do) a compilation album (or a live album, etc) in which the propper album artist is Various Artists, and also some of these songs may have the tag for the ensemble that performed in the recording (not the same for all tracks). This will cause MB to assign to some tracks “Various Artists” as album artist (via the ALBUMARTIST tag) and “Various Artists; Some Ensamble” to those that also have an ENSEMBLE tag.
This will break the album, specially if you have Album Artist as your first sort key.

How can I prevent MB from including ENSAMBLE as Album Artists and, if possible, make it include it in Musician Credits List instead?

29

Questions / Re: Help regarding the year tag dispaly format

« on: August 13, 2014, 07:34:35 PM »

Ok.
I did some wiki research and using the function $Date I’m now able to make the thinks work the way I want again. Thank for the great sotware Steven.

30

Questions / Help regarding the year tag dispaly format

« on: August 12, 2014, 08:34:46 PM »

Suddenly, MB (2.3.5133, portable) has begun to format the year tag in my mp3 files. Whereas before it was yyyy-mm-dd; now it is dd/mm/yyyy.
I haven’t done any change to MB, but I just update my OS from win7 to win8.1, so I’m guessing it has to do with it.
My FLAC and m4a files, however, still show the date as usual (all my mp3 tags are in ID3v2.4). All the files newly added has this new format, while those already in library had to be re-scanned to display it.

This breaks my configuration because I have a virtual <earliest date> tag that compares <original year> to <year> in order to get the earliest release event, that tag helps me deal with re-issues, foreign releases, special editions released after the original, etc. and I use it for all my chronological sortings, but now it’s broken for those files with that new year format.
Is there a way to tell MB to keep using the old, more convenient (IMHO) format? And if not, is there a way to implement it?

Thanks in advance.