want REAL advanced playlists / filters?

[DaledeSilva]

I was disapointed with the "and / or" implementation for autoplaylists.
iTunes does it this way, but it is limited. Winamp does it better.

I described the issue here:
http://www.mediamonkey.com/forum/viewto ... t=advanced


ANYWAY,
I was making filters today and trying to make them quicker I gave a few characters a try..

I found that this is possible in a limited way (but far less limited than not being possible at all).

note that in MM3, you can use;

";" in the search box to specify "OR"
" " (a space) in the search box to specify "AND"
"" and surround a string with quotes to specific an EXACT string..

well well... turns out these work in filters and autoplaylists also!
But remember, the search box's default behaviour for a space is AND.. but the default in a filter or autoplaylist is EXACT

so.. normal example:

Genre contains Christmas and artist contains Bing Crosby
(constructed like below)

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Match ALL of these criteria

Genre contains:
Christmas

Artist contains:
Bing Crosby

but I realise that the genre 'could' be "xmas"
so... advanced example:

Genre contains ( Christmas OR Xmas ) AND Artist contains Bing Crosby

This is not usually possible because you can only use AND or OR... not both in a complicated equation...

but you can - just write it like this:

Code: Select all

Match ALL of these criteria

Genre contains:
Christmas;Xmas

Artist contains:
Bing Crosby

or.. as another example.. if I want a title to contain both the words "love" and "silly", in the search box I would write:

Code: Select all

love silly

and it would treat the space as an AND

but in a filter the string would be treated as if you wrote it like this

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"love silly"

which means it has to be that exact order

but if you add extra quotes to the imaginary ones, you can still do AND

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title contains:
"love" "silly"

Sorry about making this post a bit convoluted... hope you understood what's possible.

DEV'S... I don't know if you meant this to be possible or if it's a side effect of adding the new search commands, but it's really useful.. so please add an information button to the criteria popup dialogs in filters and autoplaylists that describes the ability to use these logical operators for those who don't see this post.

Dale

[telliott]

How would I do Genre contains podcast OR title contains <whatever>?

In MM2, I was trying to do this to catch all new podcasts from iTunes (watched folder) where most podcasts had correct genre tags but a few had genre tags that overlapped other files.

I'm assuming this won't be a problem with MM3 since podcasts will be downloaded within the program.

Tim

[DaledeSilva]

I just checked.. and yes.. these logical operators do work in MM 2.


however, while we can say:

genre is this or this

you cannot say genre is this or title is this
(you can do it in a limited way on MM 3.0 but not at all on MM 2)


your best bet is to say:

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any text field contains:
podcast;title

(where "title" is whatever you want - remember, if it's got spaces, put it in quotes)

it's not gonna be perfect.. but it might work well enough. Hope it helps

Dale.

[easye]

How would I do Genre contains podcast OR title contains <whatever>?

In MM2, I was trying to do this to catch all new podcasts from iTunes (watched folder) where most podcasts had correct genre tags but a few had genre tags that overlapped other files.

I'm assuming this won't be a problem with MM3 since podcasts will be downloaded within the program.

Tim

I don't mean to take this thread in another direction, but . . .
I was trying to do the same thing as this and came up with another solution based on a number of posts I found on the forum. Basically what I did was create an Autostart script called AddPodcast.vbs. I have MM watching the iTunes podcast folder and whenever a new podcast is added to the library this script is run and updates fields so that they are all consistent. Then it's easy to build a playlist based on Genre=Podcast

BTW, I did one other thing that I thought was a little different. In the playlist I added a search criteria for Rating = Unknown. Then when I finish listening to a podcast on my iPod, I change the rating to anything other than unknown. The next time I sync the iPod, it updates the rating on my PC, therefore it is not in the playlist anymore, and it then gets removed from my iPod. I like this because it gives me more control over when I want a podcast is removed.

Here is the code for AddPodcast.vbs:

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Sub onStartup
  Script.RegisterEvent SDB, "OnTrackAdded", "AddPodcast"
End Sub

Sub AddPodcast(track)

  If InStr(track.Path,"G:\iTunes\Podcasts") > 0 Then
    track.Genre = "Podcast"
    track.UpdateDB
  End If

  If UCase(track.Genre) = "PODCAST" Then
    track.ArtistName = "@Podcast"
    track.AlbumArtistName = "@Podcast"
    track.UpdateArtist
    track.UpdateAlbum
    track.UpdateDB
  End If

End Sub

One other solution is if all your podcasts are in the same directory you can build an autoplaylist where Path/Filename contains '\Podcast\' or some other directory name. This will end up adding all you podcasts to the playlist. However, if you don't do the autostart script I mention above, some of the fields may be inconsistent between the podcasts.

[Guest]

What i would like is that autoplaylists in Mediamonkey were so powerful as in jriver media center.

[martialartsguy]

I love this, but it doesn't appear to work for Mood or Occasion, where most of my ";" delimited tags appear for my music. Any suggestions for creating Auto Playlists using these tags?

[Guest]

Please, consider improving autoplaylists. Jriver Media Center has the smartlist concept and is terrific. See, for example:
http://wiki.jrmediacenter.com/index.php ... _Modifiers

I think, with a system like this, autoplaylist would be the best jukebox software, undoubtfully.

[Nova5]

It would seem to me that cleaning up tags would be a requirement of a good collection for use of this program. Christmas and Xmas are the same thing so one needs to correct Xmas to Christmas. or both to Holiday, which thou could contain Halloween. So it would be best to keep the generes to the specific holiday.

But it would be great if MM allowed a freeflow type formula for checking using &(and), !(not), |((Pipe)or)