Is there a "Genres Browser" in musicbee ?

[whismerhill]

hi,
I was using calibre recently to manage my ebooks collection, and it got me thinking
what if you could edit genres in musicbee the way you can edit authors,tags & such in calibre ?

There is indeed an awesome tool called the "alter tag browser"

the way it works is open a new small window with a table where all tags are shown (alternatively all authors or all something else)
and a column with the number of times this tag is represented in the library, a column that represent the previous value of the tag (blank at start), and that's all.

inside this table you can rename on the fly any tag to any text including the label of another tag
when you close the tag browser, it will then rename all references of said tag to the new text.

what could you do with it in musicbee :
-easily see that "R B" genre has 3 tracks inside & the "R & B" genre has 30, then proceed accordingly
-easily change electro genre to "electronic music" if you wanted
& so on....

EDIT:
here's two pics that shows how it works somewhat :



here you can see I renamed two categories to "SciFi", if I click cancel, nothing is done (of course)
otherwise the software will go through all 31 book instances to change the tags accordingly (note: there will be one less tag at the end.)

[hiccup]

It's not the same as in Calibre, but for such I use the column browser.

When you have setup a column for 'Genre' there, you would see both the "R B" and the "R and B" (and "Rhythm and blues", "RnB" etc. etc.) there as entries.
If you click each of them, in the main panel you will have all files with that tag, and you can than easily bulk-change those.

That also works for lining up and correcting artist names. (Such as Tchaikovsky, Tchaikoffsky, Tschaikowsky etc. etc)

Is this what you would like to achieve here?

[alec.tron]

In Musicbee there's a lot of ways to display the data differently...
I prefer to use this instead of the column browser... and a picture paints a thousand words and all that... so have a look here:
http://getmusicbee.com/forum/index.php?topic=10884.0
Top left corner - where it says "Album Artist" \/ ? Click that, there's multiple filters attached to that, "Genre" being one of them, and selecting one will filter your main library view to files with just that genre.

Hope this helps.
c.

[whismerhill]

It's not the same as in Calibre, but for such I use the column browser.

When you have setup a column for 'Genre' there, you would see both the "R B" and the "R and B" (and "Rhythm and blues", "RnB" etc. etc.) there as entries.
If you click each of them, in the main panel you will have all files with that tag, and you can than easily bulk-change those.

That also works for lining up and correcting artist names. (Such as Tchaikovsky, Tchaikoffsky, Tschaikowsky etc. etc)

Is this what you would like to achieve here?

yeah I guess that's somewhat close, still it's not as easy, fast & direct as the perfect effectiveness & overview of calibre solution (which has everything in one window at a glance. Also it requires displaying the genres browser inside your main view as far as I know
whereas in calibre it's a separate window/view which is more practical since it's a specific view that's used only for sorting out, and the main view is kept for "playing". (EDIT: also the search field inside this view on calibre searches only within the tags, whereas the search of musicbee returns all tracks that include the genre "rock" for example, and therefore the column browser will include additional genres that these result tracks possess)

maybe this thread could be moved in the music bee wishlist ? ? ?

Thanks for your input either way.
Whis.

edit: @alec.tron
yeah that's what hiccup was saying pretty much.

[whismerhill]

an important note: the column browser way can't remove or rename a genre while selecting multiple tracks from different authors & albums at once ...

[hiccup]

an important note: the column browser way can't remove or rename a genre while selecting multiple tracks from different authors & albums at once ...

At this very moment I can't think everything through thoroughly, but:

1. Are you sure about that? I sometimes do bulk edits that way. The column browser is the filter, and the bulk edits can be done on all, or selected resulting tracks that are displayed in the main panel. (using tag editor opened below it, or as a floating panel)
But you have to be careful doing it that way, see point 2:

2. With MusicBee you can have multiple genres in a file (separated by ;  ) Does Calibre handle such? It might complicate things.
When you follow the procedure as described above, in tag editor you will only see tags displayed that all files have in common and are completely identical.
So if some tracks already have multiple genres, the genre field will show empty for those, since they are not completely identical between all filtered and selected files. That might give the wrong impression that those tracks have no Genre tag at all, whilst they actually do have genre tags that you may not want to erase/overwrite.

Please give this all some thought, play around with it, and if you are sure you have a good suggestion to make this all a bit easier, yes, please create a wish for it on the wishlist board.

[whismerhill]

Yes sometimes bulk edits do work in music bee
Particularly if all tracks have EXACTLY all the same genres
But sometimes you can't bulk edit even if all tracks have the genre you wanna remove/rename, probably some tracks have different genres I'm not sure how it works and I'm not sure what kind of detail could help pinpoint why that sometimes doesn't work

While out of topic, I should pinpoint that calibre bulkediting has actually two fields when managing multiple files : one for tag additions, & one for tag removals. However the bulk editing feature is unused in the "alter tag browser" hence why it's a bit out of topic

But anyway back to the subject which is the "alter tag browser" it just displays all tags in a single window & applies all changes on close, it does it automatically but file by file, it doesn't matter if a file has more tags or different tags
only the ones that were renamed/deleted through the interface are manipulated.

What is more frustrating in music bee is that I feel like all the functionality is there, it just lacks an appropriate UI for it :p
I was even trying to read the API documentation to see if I could do it, but I may be getting way over my head lol