Author Topic: Choose which tags to import  (Read 1278 times)

MSWallack

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I'm finally re-ripping and tagging my collection. Yeah, yeah. I know.  Anyway, for the time being I'm focusing on Artist, Album, Song, etc. and not worrying about certain other tags. Which leads to my question. A lot of my music includes Composer tags, but so far those tags are, at best, inconsistent or missing, and in other cases, a total mess. But when I import the tracks into MB, it appears that info in the Composer tag fields is getting sucked into MB. Is there a way to tell MB to ignore certain tag fields on import?

Zak

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MusicBee will read all existing tags in the files you import and try to map them to the ones it knows about, including Composer.

If you really don't want them, your options are:
* see if you can tell your CD ripping program to skip the Composer tag when it downloads track information (assuming that's what it's doing, you didn't say what you are using)
* use something like Mp3tag to remove all Composer tags before importing your tracks into MusicBee (an extra step, but it would be very fast)
* delete the Composer details after importing your tracks into MusicBee.
Bee excellent to each other...

MSWallack

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Thanks. I'm using dBpoweramp and I'm letting it use MusicBrainz & FreeDB to get metadata, but I'm only really checking the Artist, Album, & Title metadata. But I wanted to keep the Composer metadata so that at some later point I could go back and start working on that information. Thus, I'm not keen on deleting all of those tags. I was really hoping that I'd be able to tell MB to just ignore that field (or perhaps map that field to some other MB field from which information about artists is not taken).

I guess my real problem is that my sort orders are somewhat jumbled. I've curated the Artist, Album Artist, Sort Artist, and Sort Album Artist fields carefully, but then one of those artists may also be listed as a composer and, if I didn't fix that sort, then I wind up with somewhat unpredictable results.

psychoadept

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I'm really confused about what's happening, because the composer tag is not used in any of the default sorting nor does it appear under Artist. It shouldn't be getting in your way at all, and you can go back and correct it at your leisure.

Can you give us a screenshot of where you're having trouble with it?

Update: it occurs to me that you might be having issues with MusicBee's custom sorting algorithm. I've run into the problem where it will apply the composer sort order to artists and album artists. If that's it, I can explain how to separate Sort Composer from the other sort tags.
Last Edit: July 02, 2020, 10:46:38 PM by psychoadept
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MSWallack

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I've been doing a bit more investigating and I'm curious... I have a main database for the CDs that I've ripped in my collection. I have a secondary database for songs that came from ... elsewhere (Amazon, eMusic, SoundCloud, etc.). When I have my main CD database open and look in Preferences | Sorting/Grouping | Artists, I see a huge number of artists that I don't have CDs by. Was that info populated when music was imported into my "elsewhere" collection? If so, is there a way to keep the artist list separate for each database?

psychoadept

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That Artists list is ONLY for the custom sorting algorithm (notice the windows is labeled Artist and Composer Name Sorting). It includes all Artists, Performers, Remixers, Guest Artists, and Composers tagged in your files, if they have a sort value different than the literal printed value (they may also show up with the printed value if you've explicitly entered that). If you want an artist sorted differently as a composer than as an artist, you can enter "composer:" at the beginning of the field.  For instance:



Basically, don't worry about it because all it is used for is sorting. It won't show up anywhere when you're viewing your library (either of them).
Last Edit: July 03, 2020, 08:28:03 PM by psychoadept
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MSWallack

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Thanks. That was what I was thinking. But I'll give you an example that caused me enormous confusion. I have a few CDs by Go West. But I couldn't find them. Eventually, I found that they were sorted as West, Go. I checked the tags on my CDs and found that the tags were correct. But when I checked that table, I found that the entry for Go West was, indeed, West, Go. I can't find a track that had "West, Go" as the sort entry for artist, album artist, or composer. So I'm ... befuddled.

(And don't judge me for having CDs by Go West; blame a long-ago girlfriend...)

psychoadept

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The custom sorting is stored in MusicBee's database, although it should be pulling existing sort tags, too. Anyway, if you delete that entry it will go back to sorting as expected.

The tricky thing with custom sorting is that the sort values are applied library-wide when you change them on one track. That's an odd one indeed, but it must have found that sort value for at least one of the tracks.
Last Edit: July 04, 2020, 02:45:16 AM by psychoadept
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