Questions Concerning Just About Everything

[TheFenderBender]

Allow me to apologize in advance if this is in the wrong place, or if I am breaking any MM Forum rules that I am not aware of.

I am sufferring a great headache at the moment, as I have newly been introduced to MM, and greatly wish to use its full potential.

Allow me to explain - I have a moderate music collection (2,704 files) of exclusively mp3s. They each possess only an ID3v2.3 tag, containing only Artist, Title, and Album. The are stored in one root directory with subfolders by Artist.
I was introduced to MM being told that it is similar to MusikCube, but on steroids. This seems to be accurate. I started looking to retag all of my files with information from AllMusic, as I have deemed it is the most complete source, and I really like the idea of Moods, Styles, Themes, etc.
I got flustered, as the Amazon function in MM was inadequate for what I wanted to achieve and went searching... a thread here led me to Mp3Tag, and a .src file for it to allow me to use AllMusic as a source.
Then I took a look at MM. Here's my first real question: Does MM support things like Moods, Styles, etc? Am I wasting my time trying to tag these fields?

My other major question would be... well, I haven't really begun retagging... and I'd like to do it the most efficient way, whether it is with MM, Mp3Tag.., what have you. My only major requirement is that I use AllMusic as the source... so what is the best and fastest way?

Regardless of what does the tagging, I intend to use MM as my all-purpose music center, as it seems to be a great program.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Thank you all.
(For God's sake, I need some aspirin.)

[Steegy]

Hey

I hope your headache is over.
You could try Web Sources Tagger (see my signature) to get tags from AMG. It gives the same results as Mp3tag.
You can choose yourself where to store Mood, Style, ... (MediaMonkey has Mood, Occasion, and 3 custom fields that are available for this info).

Cheers
Steegy

[TheFenderBender]

Ah, at last a reply! I am ever-grateful.

I will look through Web Sources Tagger.

I would like a like a little more information on the MM features though. In the standard columns view of the library, you cannot add Mood, Style, etc. as a column I believe, correct? You see, I wish to have these fields for functionality purposes...

For example, when I have finally retrieved tags for all of these files, I would like to be able to select a particular Mood in MM and have all of the files matching that criteria appear. Ditto for Style, etc.

Is this possible?

Thank you again for the help.

[Steegy]

1)

In the standard columns view of the library, you cannot add Mood, Style, etc. as a column I believe, correct?

Correct, but this will (probably) be included in the soon-to-come MM 3.0.


2)

...I would like to be able to select a particular Mood in MM and have all of the files matching that criteria appear. Ditto for Style, etc.

There are several ways to do that:
- nodes Library > Classification > Mood
- use the MagicNodes script to create your own nodes (e.g. to add a new node that lists all possible Custom1 values)
To remind you: you can use Custom1 for everything you want. You can change its name (in the options) to e.g. "Style", and you can use it almost anywhere (including to show / sort as column).
Please ask questions about MagicNodes (including how to use it, what node mask to use) in the linked thread.
- ... (if MM 3.0 supports the previous point 1))


You're welcome.

[TheFenderBender]

Very well... I'll give it a shot.

Something still bothers me. I don't know a whole lot about tags to begin with... but Mp3Tag, I've noticed, adds tags to my files that MM doesn't seem to read... why is that? MM doesn't pick up on the genre, mood, style, or theme tags that I add in Mp3Tag... and all of those are standard, correct? I shouldn't have to use a custom field, right? I'd prefer to use standard fields...

Much appreciated.

[Steegy]

Once you have added your songs to the MediaMonkey library, MediaMonkey will use the stored values to display (it doesn't read from the files, but if tags change it will write them also to the files).

If you change the tags from outside MediaMonkey, there's no way that MediaMonkey can know about it, except:
- when you use File Monitor (while MediaMonkey is running): it notices when files are changed from outside MediaMonkey and will update the library (Gold only)
- when you rescan the library / check for changes

MediaMonkey reads all id3v2 tags, and lets you see/edit most of the standard id3v2 tags (so that shouldn't be the problem). MM3.0 will add even more tag support.
To see what tag formats and tag fields are currently supported, see MediaMonkey's help file.

Cheers
Steegy

[TheFenderBender]

(Yes, I am aware that I'm being a complete pain in the ass at this point!)

Hehe. Joking aside, your rescanning suggestion made sense... (although in programs I've used before, changes in tags would automatically be recognized...) so I did that.

Now MM picks up on the Genre, but still no Mood, Style or Theme.

Am I retarded... or is MM just not capable of this?

[Teknojnky]

MM has Mood, Tempo, Occasion, Quality fields but may or may not be able to read other applications tags depending on how their fields match up and/or if they are standard.

One way to import non-supported tags is to export playlists of each type from your other app, load these in MM and set the field appropriately within MM.

It's not the most convenient, but should work between any media librarys that can export/save playlists.

[Steegy]

Looking at http://www.mediamonkey.com/sw/webhelp/n ... erties.htm we see that MediaMonkey can read it's own Mood, Tempo, Occasion, Quality id3v2 tags, but that they're not standards.
So that might be why Mood isn't read. Style and Theme are not mentioned in the list and so are not supported, but they will probably be in MM3.