J. River Media Center MC14 (Album Artist Custom) custom metadata

Album Artist (Custom) - is very handy for a number of reasons; here is a post from the forum I wrote.

Using Tiesto featuring BT:

Artist: Tiesto (featuring BT)
Album Artist: Tiesto
Album Artist (auto): Tiesto

You retain the album as Tiesto's album by filling in Album Artist; whatever goes here overrides whatever different entries are found in Artist.

This way you get to retain the actual artists who play on the track in the Artist field.

If you want to "pull" out artists from Multiple Artist discs into one tile, then you need a custom tag field like Album Artist (Custom), for example, because you want to retain the disc as a multiple artist yet have these specific artist have one tile for ALL their songs; otherwise those songs on Multiple Artist discs get "stuck" in the Multiple Artists Tile.

So I don't think you all need a custom tag filed in your situation because you can keep your actual singers/players in the Artist field (which seems most intuitive to me; your mileage may vary) and then simply set the Album Artist filed with the default Artist (Tiesto) and you get Album Artist (auto) = Tiesto.

You don't have to do this at all but the key, I think, is to retain original listing of artist, mispellings, uncommon monikers, etc. but keep disks "together" in the database (multiple vs. single artist album).
Here is an example that will make it clearer:

Best of Jamaican Ska. This album is a multiple artist cd. Baba Brooks & His Badass Band - Felling Ballsy is track 11.

Artist: Baba Brooks & His Badass Band
Album Artist: (JA Multiple Artists)
Album Artist (auto): (JA Multiple Artists)

now rememeber, all the other tracks on this album have different Artist entries (even if all the artist fields for this album are the same EXCEPT one character, like Bands instead of Band MC will auto fill the Album Artist (auto ) field as Multiple Artist - I happen to use JA Multiple Artist and Multiple Artist for naything non-JA)

More clarity - Imaine this Baba Brooks album is not a multi artist album but his solo release right or better yet a compilation of just his work that ends up giving us various incarnations of his name.

So now the album is The Best of Baba Brooks.

BUT - each track uses a different artist field:

Baba Brooks - Best of Baba Brooks - 01 - the bomb
Baba Brooks Band - xxxxx
Baba Brooks Badass Band
Baba Brooks & His Big Band

so.....we now do this:

Artist: stays as the variations listed just above
Album Artist: we use Baba Brooks here to avoid
Album Artist (auto): having this auto filled as Multple Artist

So just remeber that Album Artist is just that. If it's a multiple artist disc you'll find MC will take care of it, but sometimes you need to correct for this because the artist fields vary for a disc that IS NOT a multi-artist disc (every track has The Meters except track 9 which is The Meters (w/ Dr. John). So you step in and use Album Artist to overide Album Artist (auto)

Album Artist = you
Album Artist (auto) = MC

You can for example tag a Bob Dylan Tribute album, with all different artists, as having Album Artist = Bob Dylan. You have decided to overide MC which would have correctly labled this a multi-artist disc because you feel you'd like it associated with Dylan when you browse Bob Dylan.

you then setup all your view schemes to use Album Artist (auto) because it will show what MC has labeled everything as, and remember your field Album Artist simply overides Album Artist (auto) so you don't need to specifically view that field.

All Multiple Artist albums need to be ripped to their own specific folder. If they are not, MC creates album tiles/panes for each track.

This method is all standard MC usage; it let's you retain unique entries for Artist field and then overide MC to let it know the reason the Artist fields differ is your choice.

You could simply put these "artist additions" in the Name field, but I don't feel that is appropriate or easy.

Jimi Live At The Palladium
Jimi Hendrix & Neil Diamond - Jimi Live - 01 - xxxx
Jimi & Miles Davis - Jimi Live - 02 - xxxx

etc. It works well. And as I said often with JA 45s you can save misspellings without the need for [sic]....you just correct it with Album Artist field.

Artist = The Vicroys
Album Artist = The Viceroys
Album Artist (auto) The Viceroys

Artist = The Vicerooys
Album Artist = The Viceroys
Album Artist (auto) The Viceroys

I will now explain why I use another custom field Album Artist (Custom). This field is easily copied (manually) using the Library Tools>Move/Copy Fields function.
You have to fill Artist anyway, so I select all files with Crtl-A and then choose to Move/Copy fields (leave source field alone) and one mouse click copies them over. Sometime I need to manually tag it because the Artist field may differ as described above.

Quick note on Album Artist (auto) & (custom fields):

Multiple Artists
JA Multiple Artists
45 Rpm Jamaican

everything else is single artist entries e.g. Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, anyone who has at least one album with just their name on it in the Album Artist or Album Artist (auto) field (override process just described)

This isn't particularly well written, but you'll get the drift I think:

Commonly, you'll have an album where one track will have a duet or someone who joins in etc. and you want to mention it. The problem here is that you have Artist filed empty - fill it with Baba Brooks. Now you have Album Artist (Auto) accurately reflecting "what's going on" on the album. Now you decide to modify track 3 because you notice in the liner notes that Dizzy Moore is playing trumpet along with Baba Brooks. Change Artist to Dizzy Moore and Album Artist (Auto) now dictates that there are two of these albums; one with with only one track. Some have argues that you could simply add this extra info into the Name field or somewhere else but it makes sense to have it here, it's intuitive. And MC makes a nice provision in that you can simply decide to use Album Artist to retain Baba Brooks under both Album Artist & Album Artist (auto). But this field, Album Artist, is not initially filled even when you start tagging all the files on the album with the same artist, so if you make a change in Artist as noted above you should use the Copy Field function.

This all works great except for the problem of Multiple Artist discs. If you have a lot of these compilations, mixes, etc. and want to retain accurate Stats then you want to keep them as Multiple Artists = 1 Disc. I didn't like browsing through Artist Album (auto) (which unifies all of Baba Brooks' various name incarnations under "Baba Brooks") and when I enter the Baba Brooks tile....that is not all of his music in there. There may be 5,10, even 20 tracks that are "stuck" in the (Multiple Artists) Tile. I am sure there is another way around this but my solution was to create a new field (Album Artist (Custom)) to accommodate this since I like to have all an Artist's work under one Tile. Another reason to not use Artist is that if you have a TON of multiple artist discs, this field gets cluttered. You end up with very esoteric and unknown artist "cluttering" your browsing. Imagine a library of 200,000 songs; the Artist field looks whack. It's simply overwhelming. But you can keep it as a separate view and then have a trimmed down version where you run through all the comps. and when you see "big name" artists or your favorites who already have their own entire albums and Tiles, you add only select choices to your custom field; the result is a much more clean browse. You can still have all your other views by Album or Artist or play entire Genres on shuffle but this is just something that unites the two ideas I mentioned....1. to pull out artists from the Multiple Artists Tile and make a comprehensive listing of their work under one Tile (e.g. Bob Dylan contains Bob Dylan & The Band, Bob Dylan & The Hawks, Dylan & The Dead, Dylan & Clapton) 2. make a custom view scheme which reflects more popular artists or favorites that is realistic to peruse (i.e. free of one hit wonders).

The point is that when you try to modify Multiple Artist albums in order to "unite" all the tracks of one artist, the albums are no longer counted/organized as one album & MC thinks there are more than one of the same album by different artists, both of which are incomplete. Play around with it, it's weird. The benefits listed above at then end of the paragraph are nice and you can still have a view scheme named Artist that gives you every single artist; I'd rather have the power to have both ways of browsing: hihgly detailed /comprehensive vs. general/popular. I probably mentioned this already: besides getting cluttered with literally thousands or Artists, the Artist view is FULL of the monikers, aliases, and misspellings. EVERY unique entry in the entire Artist field is shown; so for your Baba Brooks compilation in which yyou maintained 20 unique artist entries for him on only ONE album...it shows up 20 times in the Artist field!!!

Okay quick rundown on the others:

Exclude - very handy for files that need to be in MC but not visible. CUE files tend to get pulled in as one file that is the duration of the entire album. There are other instances as well; sounds esoteric but you'll run into times when you need this. In your view scheme EDIT you just select the metadata field and choose the files tagged YES (which you of course fill in - anything you don't tag is UNASSIGNED which can act as "no" . So you simply exclude all files with the tag field Exclude filled in "yes".

Female Vocal = yes
Something I started doing for the ladies. Special View Scheme with only files who have yes in this Female Vocals field.

Tags Incomplete = something I use to know what is unfinished. You can include or exlcude files based on one tag field. So let's say I import 20 untagged albums, all jacked up and no cover art, I tag the field Tags Incompete=yes and all my view schemes except one (Tag Editing) are set to exclude these files. If I want to work on them , I navigate to the Tag Editing view scheme which is set to only display these files, rather all my files, but includes these as well.

Venue - something to fill in with either an actual venue for a live show or any character so I can know what files or live, bootleg, kind of ghetto etc. Good for trading with live traders to know where these are and be able to list them all by themselves. Again, you can just enter "x" or "N/A" here. when you go to the Venue field in your Edit View Scheme a window pops up displaying all the entries in that particualr field. so if 25,000 files have "x" and the rest are unassigned, the Xs are your live shows. I just use the field because it implies live; up to you what you want to put in the field...it's just like a marker. MC knows what marks are in the field and displays all of them with checkboxes for you to pick which ones are going to be either included or excluded.

Description - the above relates to this. I just started doing it.

a - single artist album
z - multiple artist album
zz - JA multiple artist album
zzz - 45 rpm Jamaican

This is sort of a pain and it's hard to explain without a picture handy, but if I display the Jamaican Archive as Albums and choose to sort them by Album Artist (custom), every single file & album gets displayed. The problem is that even though Album Artist (custom) fixes the earlier problems of mixing up albums by creating two or three or four in different places - imagine scrolling down through Artist Album (auto), the multi-albums are listed in their own Tile, if yo unavigate in there to an Allen Katz CD you'll find it incomplete because you changed a Kingstonians track to have Album Artist = The Kingstonians. the rest of the tracks all say Multiple Artist (JA Multiple Artists). Go back out and start scrolling down to the Kingstonians' tile, when you go inside you'll find that missing track, and the album it is on.....you'll see all the Kingstonians albums when you go "inside" the Kingstonians' tile....even the albums that thy have tracks on which are actually Multiple Artist albums....this is good BUT now you're multi artist albums are screwed up...what happens when you go the Album tile for that Allen Kaatz mix and send it to the burner...you end up missing half the tracks because you "pulled" them into the Album Artist (auto) tiles......every artsist you do this for, the missing files on the multi-artsist discs, MC thinkgs actually has an album by that name e.g. The Kingstonians - Allen Kaatz Presents but that album has one track.....it's not just an association because if you use MC for Statistics it reports the wrong number of albums and as I said you are not keeping discs together anymore - MC displays any albums that have variations in the Album Artist (custom) field first just as it would do for the Album Artist (auto) field; this means that when you go to setup a nice album cover view of all your albums you end up with all you're Multiple Artist albums first BECAUSE they have varying entries in Album Artist (custom). The only way I have found to correct this is use Description then Album Artist (Custom) in the Sorting . You get to browse as listed above. For the result, it is not a lot to tag these extra fields. I have them setup all in order in my Tag Editing Pane view scheme.

HP TOUCHSMART 300

I picked up a 300 for the kitchen, and as a user of a tablet laptop for quite a few years I will say overall, I am impressed.

This tech is different in that there are IR sensors embedded in the side frame of the PC; this means your finger is an active digitizer in essense (you can hover over the screen if needed or just use very light touch).

I have little need for an analog keyboard because I have configured the Touchsmart for ease of use. I am not a fan of the Touchsmart suite because once you start using the apps, they all stay loading in memory - this quickly bogged down the PC. Maybe with 4+ GB of RAM this is not an issue.

Furthermore, there is little true functionality involved with the picture & music apps. I have other specialized apps which are favorites for this, but overall, the Touchsmart suite is pretty good; mostly wow factor for kids with the Notes being handy, and I do like the Recipe Box however. Quick access to Hulu & Netflix is nice too.

Then again this is a secondary PC (well the 4th in the house) so using it for quick access to music on networked or local drives is fine.

I actually now have 4GB of RAM as opposed to 2GB because I had to return a defective 300 the other day after 2 weeks. Bad sensor in the top right which is related to my finger. I covered my fingernail with black electrician's tape and the problem was resolved (cursor would mover over the X or Maximize button but no command was committed!).

Anyway, when you configure one of these Touchsmart to use as a home automation hub or "kitchen PC" ...it's great.

I currently have on my desktop (I'll post a pic when I get the replacement here):

Magic Jack softphone
Skype (small view)
ThinkEssentials (home automation of lights, thermostat, etc)
HomeCamera.com webcam (monitoring front door of house for motion - live feed)

I do a LOT with these apps which directly affect changes in my house and handle communications and I never use the analog keyboard.

If you raise the DPI on Windows to 125%, the on-screen keyboard gets a little bigger which like, in addition to the system fonts etc.

Looking forward to our replacement Touchsmart 300, I miss it already!

Gyration remote & USB-UIRT

The Gyration is a great remote for your HTPC. Used with Intelliremote it becomes even more powerful.

Unfortunately, after owning three of these (1 basic version and 2 LCD versions) I have come to the conclusion that it is not the penultimate all-in-one remote.

I always have devices that cannot be manually programmed into the Gyration.

These included my Peachtree Nova preamp remote, certain buttons on my Vizio TV remote, and my Verizon HD box (not sure of exact model as I ditched TV service).

I've decided to further integrate my iPhone which uses RiverMote, Intelliremote, and Z-Wave Commander with a USB-UIRT device to be able to blast IR commands to the TV and preamp when needed.

I will keep the Gyration as it is essential as an in-air mouse and quite configurable with Intelliremote.

Google Voice (check Lifehacker)

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