Author Topic: Location of bands - what do people do?  (Read 3919 times)

UK82

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Hi - I'm new to MusicBee and love it so far. Very powerful with tons of useful features. Scarily good.

Anyway - when I tag stuff up I often include the location of the band/artist in their name:

ie
The Damned (London, England)
Dead Kennedys (San Francisco, CA)
Anti-Nowhere League (Tunbridge Wells, England)
The Exploited (Edinburgh, Scotland)
etc

Now it's easy to to keep the artist names consistent by just selecting 'Damned', 'The Damned', 'Damned, The' and changing them all to 'The Damned (London, England)' Then to hear every artist from London you can do a filter of 'all artists that include (London' but I'm wondering if there is a there is any recommendation on how to include the location info in a separate tag(s)? Town / State / Country.

Is it just the case of using Custom tags? I see one of the 'save to music file as tag' values is actually 'Location'. So if I did 3 custom tags for town/state/country then I could concatenate these 3 into Location to save it with the file... It would be a bit manual but doable.

Just thinking out aloud really. Does anyone else actually do this? (include location info for the artist). Now you've read this you know you want to...

psychoadept

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I use the Location custom tag for this.  All tags are entered as (for example) Chicago; Illinois; USA.  That way, in the column browser or library explorer I can easily select City, State, or Country separately.
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UK82

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I use the Location custom tag for this.  All tags are entered as (for example) Chicago; Illinois; USA.  That way, in the column browser or library explorer I can easily select City, State, or Country separately.

Just did a quick test of that and that is exactly the sort of idea I was looking for. Thanks.

I renamed custom3 tag to 'Location' and set it to use the Location tag.
Then added ie New York; NY; USA as a value to this and yep - all 3 values show as separate entities if you use the Location column. Plus you can set a filter on any of the 3 values. Perfect.

I didn't know the semi colon worked so well when doing this sort of thing. Like I said - I'm still very new to MB. Learning a lot though.

Just gotta work out the best way to populate the tag now!

psychoadept

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Just gotta work out the best way to populate the tag now!

Since you have a lot of the information in your tags already, you can probably use the Additional tagging & reporting tools plugin to quickly transfer it to the custom tag.  Just be sure to test, test, test on a few files until you're sure that it's working as desired.

http://musicbee.wikia.com/wiki/Additional_Tagging_and_Reporting_Tools
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UK82

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Just gotta work out the best way to populate the tag now!

Since you have a lot of the information in your tags already, you can probably use the Additional tagging & reporting tools plugin to quickly transfer it to the custom tag.  Just be sure to test, test, test on a few files until you're sure that it's working as desired.

http://musicbee.wikia.com/wiki/Additional_Tagging_and_Reporting_Tools

I've been looking at that but can't work out a way to do it. I currently have the location as part of the band name and I can't see any (obvious) way to parse the tag and extract parts of it.

Anyone know if you can sort by the end of a column value? I don't mean Z-A instead of A-Z. I mean the column is actually sorted by the last chars of the string. That way you would get all xxx (London, England) and yyy (Chicago, IL) tagged bands next to each other. Even sorting by say the last 10 chars would probably work. I can then multi-select and tag manually (better than nothing). I can't see anything in the custom sort options to allow this. Can't believe it isn't possible though!

BTW this whole 'location thing' can get pretty complicated. There's quite a few scenarios when you start thinking about it. Mainly with big cities and the UK. The UK is England, Wales, Scotland & Northern Ireland. Within those countries you have counties (ie Hampshire, Dorset, Cornwall etc).

ie
The Ramones (Queens, New York, NY, USA)
The Business (Lewisham, London, England, UK)
Strate Jacket (Shirley, Southampton, Hampshire, England, UK)

Probably easier just to ditch the UK all together. Stick with the countries within it. So go with
<suburb><city><state/county><country><continent>
(may as well add continent in there - today I want to easily hear all my music by bands based in South America...)

Also I'm edging towards multiple custom fields. Will make it easier in the long run I think. Plus not sure you can do $First(<customtag>) in Theater Mode so if you display location it doesn't look that good with all the semi colons in there.

Anyway - thanks for the pointers. I'm getting there...

hiccup

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This is interesting stuff.
But, how far do you want to take this? I think this would only work for very selective music and bands.
What do you do with bands with members from different cities/countries?
Or artists who lived in different countries and produced work there? (David Bowie: London, Los Angeles, Geneva, Berlin etc.)

psychoadept

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Okay, the first thing you probably need to do is go to the "Advanced Search and Replace" tool in the plugin (it will show up in the Tools menu), and click on "Import All".  That will import all the preset commands.

Then find the preset for "Move everything after <Custom text 1> from <Tag 1> to <Tag 2>".  DON'T tick the box next to it.  Set Tag 1, Tag 2, and Custom text 1 in the settings (in your case: Artist, Location, and open parentheses), then click Preview.  If you're happy with the changes, you can click Apply. (But test on a small batch before doing the whole collection!)

Once you've got the info moved in the Location tag, you can do a simple search and replace (also in the Tools menu) to get rid of the close parentheses and change the commas to semicolons.
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psychoadept

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This is interesting stuff.
But, how far do you want to take this? I think this would only work for very selective music and bands.
What do you do with bands with members from different cities/countries?
Or artists who lived in different countries and produced work there? (David Bowie: London, Los Angeles, Geneva, Berlin etc.)

Speaking for myself, I use the "hometown" of the artist (or maybe where they first became known as a musician), or the location where the band first formed. Except for the US and the UK (and thinking about Canada), I just use the country.  It's US-centred, but that is the area I know best...
Last Edit: October 29, 2015, 10:20:15 PM by psychoadept
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UK82

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Okay, the first thing you probably need to do is go to the "Advanced Search and Replace" tool in the plugin (it will show up in the Tools menu), and click on "Import All".  That will import all the preset commands.

Then find the preset for "Move everything after <Custom text 1> from <Tag 1> to <Tag 2>".  DON'T tick the box next to it.  Set Tag 1, Tag 2, and Custom text 1 in the settings (in your case: Artist, Location, and open parentheses), then click Preview.  If you're happy with the changes, you can click Apply. (But test on a small batch before doing the whole collection!)

Once you've got the info moved in the Location tag, you can do a simple search and replace (also in the Tools menu) to get rid of the close parentheses and change the commas to semicolons.

Thanks Psycho. This has put me on the right track - I can't blindly use an open bracket as sometimes they may be included for other info but the "click on "Import All" " part has opened up a lot of options. Again like I said - I'm new to MB so am still finding out about things like this. Some great options in there.

I'll probably extract everything after the first bracket to a custom tempTag. This can then be the new 'artist'. I can then sort by this tag to see what city/country combos I have. Will create 4 new custom tags (suburb, city, state, country) and multi tag each unique combo by hand (won't be that much work really and only have to do it once) Can then use some of the concatenate functions available to write all these to the Location tag.

Nice once done. Today I want to hear USA Punk that was released in the 70's. Simple.

Now of course that opens up the 'what year do you put a song that was released in 1979 but appears on a 2006 compilation' question...

As for where the location of artist is? I don't sweat it too much. I just go by birthplace - or from where it says a band is from on Wiki or Discogs etc. Like genre - it's not an exact science...