Just List Albums 2.1 - Updated 17/03/2013

[beg]

thx for the fast reply.

Actually I don't really use Album Artist. I wrote my artist information into track artist field, but my CD ripping software copies it also into Album artist where then might be different artists written too. ok, this is sth. I will be able to take care of and correct this with a major more or less automatic retagging session if this makes your script working! Unless there is a simple way of editing your script to work for me since I do not need the album artist field/information..

If I could get the album name once regardless of content in artist / album artist field and then the track listing with the track artist this would be perfect in my case.. (otherwise I'd have to retag ~15000 tracks where I'd need your script to work.. )

cheers,
Bernhard

[Lowlander]

MediaMonkey can help tagging Album Artist: http://www.mediamonkey.com/sw/webhelp/f ... erties.htm or even more automated File > Maintain Library and enable the creation of multiple artist albums.

[trixmoto]

My script uses what MM considers to be an album, and MM doesn't consider it to be an album unless the album artist is the same for all tracks. Otherwise I have no way of knowing what tracks are in which album, you can't assume all tracks with them album name "Best Of" are in one album, because loads of bands have released an album with that name, for example.

[beg]

thx for explanation. Even if I have to accept that it might be like that - to me this does not make perfectly sense. My album names are unique and the album name tag does specify one specific album. (I add the specific publishers CD#, or ID# to the album name..) I do not see what same or different artists have to do with identifying an album?!

I don't see why it is a problem to take the album names like they are in the album name tag and make a list out of them. And even if sby. has 3 CDs with "Best Of ..." (and normally also with that example it would be followed by different artist or volume # making it unique - at least I'd do in order to have that information...) then there are 3 CDs with same album name but different tracks in the list. In the end this is what was saved as album name tags/CD in MM.

To me an album consists of tracks being tagged with the same album name. That's it. No need of taking into account artists. If you read the title of a CD to know the album name you do not check which artists are on it... So why is this a criteria in MM and this list?!

There is no point in treating compilations differently than normal CDs with one artist. If you tag album artist "Various artists" in case of a compilation - this does not give any information of distinguishing the album. And if there are multiply album artists as it happens to be in my case it ruins the album list completely.

Maybe I am wrong thinking of this script like a tool of writing down the album names of your CDs. And If you like with track information. So think of what you would do if you look at your CDs in your shelve and make a list out of them.

Please don't get me wrong - I love your work and that script and it is nearly doing exactly the thing I'd need. And maybe I am a very special case...

cheers,
Bernhard

[beg]

PS

My script uses what MM considers to be an album, and MM doesn't consider it to be an album unless the album artist is the same for all tracks.

And actually I don't think this is true. If you take a look at the song browser you will find under colume albums each album name exactly ONCE no matter if there are different album artists taggen in one or more albums. So what makes you think that for MM an album is only an album with ONE albumn artist, when it lists it perfectly well as one album also with plenty of different album artists?

[Lowlander]

Because there are many Greatest Hits albums and the only way to separate these into different albums is by Album Artist. If you go the Album node you will see that MediaMonkey separates all these tracks into separate albums for each different Album Artist. This is the way MediaMonkey works and it makes sense, and the script follows this. Most people will use Greatest Hits as Album value and not add additional info that would make it unique.

What's the problem of modifying the Album Artist if you don't care about this field in the first place?

[beg]

hm, because we are talking of a relly huge number of tracks to be retagged.

I tried to simply delete album artist with two CDs for a try, but it does not function. It is getting refilled with sth.. I did not understand yet this behaviour..

PS I do not work with the MM-nodes. I organize my music with the help of structred playlists which are much more flexible.

If I open the album node I get a tree list of +10000 albums - sth. I can not work with at all...

So one argument is that MM treats it like you say within the album nodes. But is does treat it differently in the album list of the song browser and this is the list I'd need..

[Lowlander]

hm, because we are talking of a relly huge number of tracks to be retagged.

MediaMonkey can help tagging Album Artist: http://www.mediamonkey.com/sw/webhelp/f ... erties.htm or even more automated File > Maintain Library and enable the creation of multiple artist albums.

[beg]

Actually this is a super weird behaviour, or a bug and I have seen this already several times doing retagging.

In this case:
I mark all the tracks of these 2 CDs, and delete the album artist, or even write a space into the album artist field. MM write the tags, the album artist desapears. But then after some seconds some of the album artists show up again! And checking property - album artist is written back into ablum artist.

[trixmoto]

If you have the "album" field populated then you must have the "album artist" field populated to. If you don't care about it, just put "VA" or "Various Artists" in all of them and hide the column.

[Lowlander]

Yes, MediaMonkey auto-populates the Album Artist with Artist value if Album is present and Album Artist is empty. This is done as Album Artist is needed to define Albums in MediaMonkey, which is the intended purpose of the Album Artist field.

[beg]

I see, thx Lowlander!

But this happened to me also in the comment and year field?! Seldom though but it happend. I had to use a space in the comment and sth. like 9999 in the year otherwise the old value was rewriten into the field after some seconds..

[Lowlander]

Do you have Infer Track Properties enabled under Tools > Options > Library? This can add data when rescanning.

There is also an issue where deleting fields will not delete the data from the tags in the files. This has been brought up by many as annoying behavior. To work around this always edit in Library and don't remove/rescan tracks in the library.

[beg]

Hi,

I wanted to say thank you for this great script which I use extensively for creating lists of music collections for my website.

One thing what would help me a lot doing this is the addition of some html tags to the output of this script. Sadly I am not good enough to modify the vbs myself, so maybe one of you can help me with that?

what I am looking for is sth. like that:

adding a <h2> before the <album-line> and a </h2><p> behind of it.

and a </br> after each <track-line>

somehow I have to add the ending </p> to the last track, but if this is complicated I'd add this to the beginning of the album-line instead and delete the first one by hand..

it the end the output should be:

</p> (will be deleted by hand)
<h2>[album-output-line]</h2><p>
[album-track-output-line]</br>
[album-track-output-line]</br>
[album-track-output-line]</br>
..
</p><h2>[album-output-line]</h2><p>
[album-track-output-line]</br>
[album-track-output-line]</br>
[album-track-output-line]</br>
..

I just don't know how to add these tags to the outputmask..

cheers,
Bernhard

[Eyal]

It's easy, just add the tags in the variable definitions:

Code: Select all

Dim Mask : Mask = "<h2><Artist> - <Album> (<Tot>/<Max>)</h2><p>" 'mask for artist albums
Dim TrackMask : TrackMask = "<Track#>. <Title>  [<Length>] / <Bitrate></br>" 'blank mask means no tracks are displayed
Dim CompMask : CompMask = "<h2><Artist> - <Album> (<Tot>/<Max>)</h2><p>" 'mask for compilation albums