Remixes

[sintec]

I've got a large physical collection of vinyl and CDs which I started ripping about a year ago. A large part of this is dance music so labels and remixers are important information which I'd like to make use of. Other threads on this board have discussed indexing by Label and I've got that configured as:

indexTags: Publisher, Label, Organization
aliasTags: Publisher:Label, Organization:Label

Which works a treat.

I'm now looking to sort out handling remix information. All the remixes in my collection have a RemixedBy tag which contains the name of the artist responsible. What I'd like is for these tracks to be added to that Artists entry in the Artist index. My initial config was:

indexTags: Artist
itemTags: RemixedBy, AlbumArtist
tagValue: Artist.merge={RemixedBy}

This led to some odd entries though, for example on a Front Line Assembly single I had a separate entry in the Artist index for remix. These looked like:

Front Line Assembly, <RemixedBy>

Not what I was looking for. I'm assuming that this occurred as a result of the way Artist maps to AlbumArtist if it's present combined with the fact that AlbumArtist has to be unique?

I've now modifed this to:

indexTag: All Artists:Artist, AlbumArtist

which seems to work better. The AllArtists entires for each artist include all of their remixes, which is the desired behavior, and the AlbumArtist entries don't include this info. Not sure if I'll keep the AlbumArtist list long term it'll depend on how useful I find it.

My next issue is that remixes are often credit by producer rather than by the name of the project everyone would associate that producer with. For instance Front 242's Religion cd single which has the following tracks:

Religion (7" mix)
Religion (Bass Under Siege Mix) [Liam Howlett]
Religion (Lovelace A go-Go Mix) [J. G. Thirlwell]
Crapage (Never Hurry A Murray Mix) [Dr Alex Patterson]

In all three cases these artists are strongly associated with a main project which I'd like these mixes to be listed under (Liam -> The Prodigy, Thirlwell -> Foetus, Alex -> The Orb). But I don't want to lose the info about how the track is credited on the release, which means the RemixedBy tag needs to stay as is for display purposes. Is the best solution going to be to add a RemixedBySort tag and then have a tagValue entry something like:

indexTag: RemixedBy, RemixedBySort
tagValue: RemixedBy.replace.sort={RemixedBySort}, RemixedBy.replace.index={RemixedBySort}.

Does this need to precede the Artist.merge={RemixedBy} entry for Artist to pick up the right info?

Will this pick up my tagOptions which ignore {The,DJ,The DJ,A,Das} properly?

Thanks.

[simoncn]

(25-03-2015 23:03)sintec Wrote:  This led to some odd entries though, for example on a Front Line Assembly single I had a separate entry in the Artist index for remix. These looked like:

Front Line Assembly, <RemixedBy>

Not what I was looking for. I'm assuming that this occurred as a result of the way Artist maps to AlbumArtist if it's present combined with the fact that AlbumArtist has to be unique?

This isn't the reason. I presume you're getting this because you have some RemixedBy tags in your files that are set to the value <RemixedBy>. You can can find out which files these are by looking at the <RemixedBy> entry in your current Artist index.

Quote:In all three cases these artists are strongly associated with a main project which I'd like these mixes to be listed under (Liam -> The Prodigy, Thirlwell -> Foetus, Alex -> The Orb). But I don't want to lose the info about how the track is credited on the release, which means the RemixedBy tag needs to stay as is for display purposes. Is the best solution going to be to add a RemixedBySort tag and then have a tagValue entry something like:

indexTag: RemixedBy, RemixedBySort
tagValue: RemixedBy.replace.sort={RemixedBySort}, RemixedBy.replace.index={RemixedBySort}.

You should use

tagValue: RemixedBy.value.sort.index={RemixedBySort}

but see below for an issue with this. Also, it would be better to put RemixedBySort in itemTags instead of indexTags so that you don't get a RemixedBySort index at the top level (unless you want this for some reason).

Quote:Does this need to precede the Artist.merge={RemixedBy} entry for Artist to pick up the right info?

It shuld be after Artist.merge={RemixedBy} because you don't want the RemixedBySort modification to RemixedBy to be applied to the Artist value (I presume).

Quote:Will this pick up my tagOptions which ignore {The,DJ,The DJ,A,Das} properly?

Thanks.

This won't work because it changes the sort value, which would mean you need three different values for display, sort and index. MinimServer only allows two different values.

A better approach would be to use another tag such as RemixProject for the project name, with the following settings:

indexTags: RemixProject:RemixedBy
itemTags: RemixedBy

This will give you a RemixedBy index containing project names instead of artist names while still allowing you to use $remixedby to include the remix artist name for tag formatting purposes (if you are doing this).

If you would like to see the project name under the Artist index instead of seeing the remix artist name there, you can use

tagValue: Artist.merge={RemixProject}

instead of

tagValue: Artist.merge={RemixedBy}

This approach of using a different tag name for each different value (artist and project) is better practice because it provides more flexibility for how you can use these values in different contexts.

[sintec]

Thanks for the quick and detailed reply. Lots of ideas there to experiment with. Hopefully I should have some time over the weekend to try them out.