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Which features would you desire in...


mjzee

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Which features would you look for if you could have a version of iTunes tailored for jazz?

Some things that come to mind:

The ability to sort by recording date (exact date, not just by year)

The ability to sort by (and search for) any musician who plays on a date

To have a "label" field (Blue Note, etc), and to sort by that field

What else would you like to see?

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Which features would you look for if you could have a version of iTunes tailored for jazz?

Some things that come to mind:

The ability to sort by recording date (exact date, not just by year)

The ability to sort by (and search for) any musician who plays on a date

To have a "label" field (Blue Note, etc), and to sort by that field

What else would you like to see?

I see what you're saying, but you could actually do some of these things now, with a little bit of compromising (mainly accepting a different name for each feature, such as "grouping" instead of "label"). Here's what I mean:

To sort by recording date, you could enter the date, in YYYY-MM-DD format, in the "description" field of the Video menu. Select all the tracks of an album, select "get info", click in Video, and enter the recording date in the "description" field. Click the "description" box in the "view options" window from the View menu, and then click on the "description" header in your iTunes display to sort by date.

I already enter personnel in the "comments" field. This would allow you to search for all albums that include a given artist (whether they're a leader or sideman), but I'm not sure how you'd be able to sort by a given sideman.

A substitute for a "label" field could be the "grouping" field, which I used to use to designate my recordings vs my son's when we were sharing a Mac.

The main issue with all of the above would be the task of entering all this data.

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I also enter personnel in the Comments field, but I don't find that the search works there. The search would work in the Lyrics field, but there the data needs to be entered per track, not per album.

Interesting ideas re the Description field of the Video menu and the Grouping field; thanks for those!

Edited by mjzee
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Sure would be nice if this metadata was automatically downloaded from the database as soon as you rip a disc though. Is this what the OP is getting at?

No, more a wish list of features that would be tailored to the interests of jazz listeners. For example, most jazz dates occur on a single day, and it would be interesting to follow a sideman, Wynton Kelly, say, through the dates he played on in a given month, or to compare what you own to what a discography shows (or create your own discographies!).

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I also enter personnel in the Comments field, but I don't find that the search works there.

I don't follow you here. Please elaborate, if you would. I have done many searches (in iTunes, that is- not on my iPods) for sidemen info in my Comments field.

By pure coincidence, before I logged on here, I was just using this very feature to take inventory of some Ike Turner compilations that have overlapping tracks, so I could delete some duplicate tracks. I typed "Ike Turner" into the search box, and the results included albums where there was a sideman named "Turner" along with an occurrence of "ike" (in this case, someone named "Mike").

Interesting ideas re the Description field of the Video menu and the Grouping field; thanks for those!

My pleasure. I like these kinds of threads, both for sharing info and so I can learn a trick or two also. :)

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I also enter personnel in the Comments field, but I don't find that the search works there.

I don't follow you here. Please elaborate, if you would. I have done many searches (in iTunes, that is- not on my iPods) for sidemen info in my Comments field.

OK: The track "Hallucinations" by Keith Jarrett, from the album "Whisper Not." See the attached file for what I entered into the Comments field.

Now, if I do a search for "Peacock," this track does not come up.

Peacock.tiff

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I also enter personnel in the Comments field, but I don't find that the search works there.

I don't follow you here. Please elaborate, if you would. I have done many searches (in iTunes, that is- not on my iPods) for sidemen info in my Comments field.

OK: The track "Hallucinations" by Keith Jarrett, from the album "Whisper Not." See the attached file for what I entered into the Comments field.

Now, if I do a search for "Peacock," this track does not come up.

This does not make sense to me at all, unless you're doing something different from how I do it. One question comes to mind- are you using quotation marks in the search box? If so, that would cause the search to fail (I just checked). I've never used quotation marks in my iTunes searches, as I might when using Google or a web search engine.

Edited by Jim R
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Aha! I just found it. I had to go to iTunes help to figure it out: "To search the Comment column, make sure it’s displayed (choose View > View Options)." Once I did that, my search for "Peacock" (no quotes) returned Albert Ayler, Carmell Jones, Keith Jarrett, etc. :party: Thanks again.

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I've always used the Grouping field to contain the personnel by name and instrument. Nice thing about that field is that your previous entries are remembered and auto-fill as you type. Not so with the Comments field, which I use to store the original album name for songs in a compilation set.

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Aha! I just found it. I had to go to iTunes help to figure it out: "To search the Comment column, make sure it’s displayed (choose View > View Options)." Once I did that, my search for "Peacock" (no quotes) returned Albert Ayler, Carmell Jones, Keith Jarrett, etc. :party: Thanks again.

I was going to ask you that, but I figured you had already done that, otherwise, how could the info possibly display?

Also, don't forget that each time you click a field heading when your music is displayed, it will re-sort in the opposite order.

I've always used the Grouping field to contain the personnel by name and instrument. Nice thing about that field is that your previous entries are remembered and auto-fill as you type. Not so with the Comments field, which I use to store the original album name for songs in a compilation set.

Interesting... thanks for the tip.

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I was going to ask you that, but I figured you had already done that, otherwise, how could the info possibly display?

Command-I. There's usually too much info to read in a columnar format.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding you. If you wanted to, for example, search for all your albums with Gary Peacock, you would need to be in columnar format, no?

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