That's embarrassing... There they are!

Thanks, I'm sorry I had my brain turned off...

The custom field names are in the MediaMonkey.ini file under your AppData folder. They can be read by a script using the SDB.IniFile object.

I don't think that helps. This is the source of where I get my custom fields but it doesn't say what the field means.

For example, I have a file "Take A Chance On Me" by Abba. I have defined in MM that the 1st Custom field is "Entry (Billboard)" and MM's File Properties dialog, in the Classification tab for this song I had entered "1978/04/22" which is when this song entered the Billboard Top 100 Songs listing. I have defined Custom 2 as "Peak (Billboard)" and for this song it shows "3". I had labelled Custom #3 as "# Weeks (Billboard)" and this shows an entry of "18". When I use the link you provided I can get the same thing as I get by programmatically reading the files id3 tag. In MM, I get a value of "1978/04/02" for string parameter of the table you reference as "Custom1" and I get the same thing if I read the id3 tag and look in the COMM field for a descriptor "Songs-DB_Custom1" (this is how the MM programmers stuff these custom fields into the file. The COMM tag by itself in the file is for Comments but the spec allows you to have multiple COMM fields and for each you can put in a descriptor to mean something else.

That's all good. What I want to programatically find is not "1978/04/02" for Custom1 but instead I want to be able to find "Entry (Billboard)". Unless another MM user sets his system up the same as me, if they use the custom fields they will be labelled differently. Note that in the file tag, this descriptor doesn't ever show up. It is always a text field that's part of a COMM id3 tag that has a descriptor "Songs-DB_Custom1" that MM wrote to the file. Since "Entry (Billboard)" is not in the file it has to be in the MM database. I want to get it and the other custom field descriptors out in my program.

Sorry if this sounds like gobbleygook. It took me a while to figure out id3 tags in general and then another while to figure out what the MM programmers did to the file to get these custom fields. It certainly is not as straightforward as track number or title but it does allow for some degree of customization.

Paul

I am working on some stuff using VBA/VB6 I will post soon that uses the COM interface so you can access all of the info for your tags the same as you can with a script except you don't need a script; you can use Excel, Word, the old Visual basic 6, etc.

One question I have is how to determine the descriptor for the 5 custom fields MM allows? I know that the descriptor in each file is "Songs-DB_Custom1" in the actual id3 tag and that the description of the custom field is not kept file-by-file but rather is in the database somewhere. I use Custom 1, 2 and 3 to keep track of Billboard date (date entered the charts, peak position and # of weeks charted). I know that someone else can define the custom fields the way they want and my values will be shown in their copy of MM under the same Custom 1-5 spots but with different descriptors.

It seems like the definitions of those 5 fields should be available in the database and easily accessed. I am guessing there is an SQL query required but I am not a database wizard. Does anyone have a code snippet or a pointer to the right place I can find this? Thanks.