Custom columns

[Aureus Pax]

How do you use the 5 custom columns available? I'd like to use them to display some ID3 tags currently not available in 'Choose columns'. Any info or directions would be great.

[MMFrLife]

In - Options > Appearance you can specify these to indicate/make visible whatever you wish about a file.

For example you could put "Fem. Vocals" for Female vocals in Custom #1". Hit ok and go to the columns in the file list (main window).
hover anywhere over the column heading and right click. You should now see a column header menu with one that says "Fem. Vocals".
Select it and it should appear as one of the column headers. Find a file(s) or album(s) in your collection that has a female vocal(s).
Select or select all > properties > classification > "Fem. Vocals" field > type in something like "lead vocals" or "female vocal - group".

Now, create a collection branch for the tree, titled "female vocal - group" and/or "fem. vocals - lead" (quotes aren't necessary); whatever
you want to specify/make visible under the general column Female Vocals.

Now click on the Entire library collection branch of the tree momentarily. Now click on the collection "female vocal - group" and watch the magic happen.
You can also create these collections based on other collection criteria such as, writing female vocals in the comments field instead - etc. and so on.

[Aureus Pax]

Thanks for your quick reply. I see now how the custom fields work. I was hoping to display info already stored in tags. For example, I have hundreds of albums that have 'Orchestra' tag or 'Soloist' to mention a few that are in common use in classical music. If I use properties\classification\custom, does it write the info in the ID3 tag? So that the info would be available everywhere where that tag is supported and not only in MM? Or does it use MM database only?

[MMFrLife]

You can display files with certain tag info just by creating a collection (and the collection branch is always visible). You don't need to have a custom field for that . However, you do if you want a column/with specialized info to be visible all the time (you'll have to be selective though, as there are only 5 - I want to request for more in wishlist).

Yes it does write to the tag. It might show up in the properties outside of MM as something like <COMMENT SONGS-DB_CUSTOM1> as a separate entry from Comments even though it has "comment" in it.

As far as whether another program will support showing it as a column, I'm not sure. I don't know of too many that will show a custom by default anyway. There might be some that you can define in terms of columns. foobar2000 has something where you can make your own column names but I don't fully understand how the "pattern" field for it is supposed to work in terms of actually showing the custom info already tagged (if that's even its purpose). Haven't used foobs in a long time.

[Lowlander]

You can't link ID3 tags to the Custom tags in MediaMonkey. You can change their name in MediaMonkey, but this still saves them as MediaMonkey custom tags in the files themselves.

[3xploiton3]

You can't link ID3 tags to the Custom tags in MediaMonkey. You can change their name in MediaMonkey, but this still saves them as MediaMonkey custom tags in the files themselves.

hmm, ok im looking this, maybe it can be changed in the future,
im write albumnotes in ID3, but can't be read by mediamonkey