Like I said, I actually don't mind the "various artists" albums because they basically become "Greatest Hits" for my songs which are already divided up into genres. As I was trying to figure out a potential solution, a couple thoughts came to my mind. One possible "solution" I came up with was to change the "Album" tags for all my random songs and identify them as "greatest hits" in an effort to force DWJuke to put them all together instead of breaking some apart. The downside to this would be the fact that I'd be screwing up the accurate "album tags" by making them inaccurate.
Well, you could turn off ID3 support altogether. Then all of your non-albumed songs would become part of an album called "Singles". The big problem would be that the artist names would all be their genre and not the actual artist. To try this, set UseID3=False and delete the contents of your Data directory.
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So I had two other thoughts. I'm not sure how exactly these would be implemented, but I'll throw them out there anyway:
- 1- Use of the "Comments" tag to organize/group songs. While I don't want to screw up my "Album" tags just to group songs, the "comments" tag is one that I don't care about at all, so I thought maybe there could be a way to have DWJuke organize songs by info in the "Comments"
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I currently don't read the Comment data at all, so I'd have to do some tinkering.
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-2- The other thought was to actually utilize the "Genre" tags to group orphaned songs (those not in specific album folders). Again, I'm not sure exactly what the syntax would be to use these, but the genre tag seems like it could be useful here
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This is slightly complicated by the fact that Genre can hold multiple values.
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-3- As a followup to #2, I'd really like to be able to select songs based on genre. Again, this goes back to the fact that I have over 10,000 songs currently loaded up, and will have more if I add ALL my mp3s. With all those songs it takes forever to get to ones that I want to play. This problem is compounded by the fact that I have a lot of different kinds of music, but there are times I'd want to skip entire genres all together.
For example, there are times I'd like to cue up a bunch of quieter, more mellow songs. But in order to accomplish this, I'd have to scan, album-by-album, through all my Black Sabbath, Iron Maiden, Dead Kennedy's etc. The alphabetic-advance doesn't help here obviously. So if I could somehow ONLY show songs of a certain genre, that would make song selection much easier. In the best case scenario, there would be some way to change genres on the fly through a button or something.
If this is completely impossible, I think the other option would be for me to have multiple data-bases. I would create one database of "Metal", one database of "Mellow" one database of "1-hit wonders" etc and then somehow be able to load (or change) from one database to the other.
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This is coming, in the form of filters. You will have the ability to filter on-the-fly on obvious things like artist, genre, and decade, and can create custom filters to have the same effect as multiple databases. The problem is the simple database engine I built is not indexed in this fashion; I need to either build a much more robust database or move the system to using a real database like SQL. This is of course a non-trivial overhaul; it is coming but it will mark a major version change.