RadioBOSS - Music Library Unique Index

[radiodungog]

Dmitry,

At Radio Dungog RadioBOSS runs very reliably and gives us very few problems.  Everything goes to air as it should - music, news, adverts, community service announcements, live shows and repeats of previous live shows.  We are pretty happy.

The main challenge we have is sorting out the large number of music tracks in our music library.  We are overwhelmed by the quantity of tracks we have and it's difficult knowing where to start.

Some of the challenges we face every day include:

1. Inconsistent artist names (the same artist listed in different ways - example:  Electric Light Orchestra / E.L.O. - The Beatles / Beatles, The - Frankie Valli / Frankie Valli & The Four Seasons)

2. Duplicates of the same song stored multiple times from different CD albums

3. Not having a summary screen with the total number of tracks for each artist listed in quantity order


We have manually started to fix items 1 & 2 above and it's a very time consuming process.

But item 3 above is best handled with a software solution and is very important because it identifies the bulk of the tracks stored by the most popular artists.

For item 1:  We are manually correcting the meta data "artist" tags so that artist names are consistent

For item 2:  We are manually editing the meta data "comment" tags to include the word "duplicate" for duplicate tracks and we leave the track we want to play unmarked.  We then generate the xml music library file and remove xml music library entries for all tracks where the comment field contains "duplicate".  This does not delete the music file - just the reference to it in the xml music library file.


Can you think of an automated way to do item 3 ?


Thanks,  Jamie C.

 

[djsoft]

Jamie, I'm not sure how Music Library can display you all songs from one artist if the name is completely different (as in your example "Electric Light Orchestra" and "E.L.O.") - it will require to maintain a database of related artists, which is not a simple task.

For names which contain full band name, e.g. "Beatles" / "The Beatles" you can simply do a files in library by "Artist" field using the "Beatles" keyword - it will show you all songs by Beatles. After you apply a filter, you can select all files and batch rename artist, so all tracks by that band will have unified name.

About your request, can you please give more information on how giving a total number of tracks by each artist will help in better organizing the library?

 

[radiodungog]

Dmitry,

For item 3 the tool that would best suit it would be something like:

index on artist and show unique with a track score next to each line

The listing might look like this:

Beatles, The (107)
AC/DC (98)
ABBA (95)
Nat King Cole (95)
George Benson (94)
Neil Diamond (86)
Bee Gees (85)
Beach Boys, The (84)
Billy Joel (84)
David Bowie (75)
...
Deep Purple (23)
Doors, The (22)
ZZ Top (22)
...
The Beatles (3)  ... you can see that this is an inconsistent artist name
The Doors (3)  ... you can see that this is an inconsistent artist name
...
Aaron Carter (1)
ABC (1)
Ad Libs (1)
Akon (1)
Beccy Cole (1)
Capitols, The (1)
Dean Martin (1)
Edith Mum (1)
...
Zap Mama (1)

and so on ...

So this list shows our biggest artist collections at the top and all the smallest artist collections at the bottom of the list.

It also highlights typos and inconsistent artist names at the bottom of the list which gives us the opportunity to go back to item 1 on the previous posting and fix those tracks manually.

This list helps identify the "health" of the music library with some sort of priority so that the artists at the top of the list with the majority of songs are given easy visability.


Does that make sense ?



Thanks,  Jamie C.

 

[djsoft]

OK, makes sense. Will be added in one of the next updates.