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Forum: General Discussion

Topic: FIlter Folders - Complex Operations & Wild Cards - Page: 1

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My file naming and file tagging protocol is this:

Last Name, First Name [space] - [space] Song Title [space] [year&chart position genre or dance step] [space] bpm [space] source. file type

or

Orbison, Roy - Pretty Woman [6401P rock A+] 126 dvd.mp4

where the tags become

Orbison, Roy = artist
Pretty Woman = title
6401 = year (but it's 1964 and it reached #1, if you see how this four space field has been manipulated)
rock = genre
126 = bpm
dvd = album (actually it's the source of the video, po being Promo Only, usa being TopHitsUSA, tms being TM Studios, etc)

I've been trying to develop some complex filter folders to perform some rather unique searches without success and perhaps some of the issues might be resolved if I better understood syntax and if there's any traditional useable wild cards such as ? meaning a single space, * meaning anything, etc

One search example I cannot accomplish is to show me all my mp4s (file type) that are old skool (genre) between 1980 and 1989 that hit the top 10 (year, where a wild card would be very helpful).

Expanding on this:

mp4 / any track with old skool in the genre / any year between and beginning with 80 & 89 in the first two digits and with greater than 0 but less than 10 in the second two digits.

Once something this complex is made working and exampled, this will really help me take full advantage of all the charting efforts.

Thank you for reading, and while your opinions on universal file naming protocol may differ, please do keep them to yourself so as to keep this thread in proper track.
 
Posted Sat 06 Apr 13 @ 9:55 am
I can't see that working, as you're not using the year field as it's intended to be used (for a four digit year).

I have similar filter folders set up to show a genre from certain years - but my year tags contain actual years.
 
I believe you can do this type of complex filtering in iTunes, ... then open it up in VDJ by selecting in the folder panel the newly created filter folder in iTunes tree, once highlighted all media results will show in your VDJ browser, it's a work around, but should work...

Good Luck.
 
Tag&Rename software could also help. You can create you own pattern (with spaces, comma..etc) and get all the information from the filename into the ID3Tags. It will be much easier then to use another application to read the ID3Tags and build all ind of playlists you need.
 
Thank you to all who have responded.

It appears as though the key to my delimma cannot be unlocked by using wild cards in the syntax as there are no wild cards allowed or assigned.

I will try to work some magic with the tagging program though I shudder at the thought of having 17,600 mp4 video files needing to be rescanned.
 
I use Mp3tag as a ID3 tagger / batch renamer and I know my way around the program if that helps.

For visual batch renaming I use Filebot, but I mainly use it for my media library.

Good Luck!
 
Cap Capello wrote :
Thank you to all who have responded.

It appears as though the key to my delimma cannot be unlocked by using wild cards in the syntax as there are no wild cards allowed or assigned.

I will try to work some magic with the tagging program though I shudder at the thought of having 17,600 mp4 video files needing to be rescanned.


I believe a bath file can be created to read the xml file to find filename X and change it to filename Y, but not up to speed on this.. Maybe someone else can help you so you won't lose all that information by rescaning everything...

Good Luck
 
Cap Capello wrote :

I've been trying to develop some complex filter folders to perform some rather unique searches without success and perhaps some of the issues might be resolved if I better understood syntax and if there's any traditional useable wild cards such as ? meaning a single space, * meaning anything, etc

You cant use wildcards in the filters but you CAN use brackets and standard operators..
Quote :
Operators "==", "=", ">=", "<=", "!=", "<>", ">", "<", "is not", "is", "equals”, "equal", "contains", "contain", "doesnt contain", "don't contain", "starts with", "start with", "ends with", "end with ", "and ", "or ", "&&", "||", "&", "|"


so...
"(Title starts with "over")& (Title contains "rainbow")
is close to
Search: "over*rainbow"
 
Cap Capello wrote :

Orbison, Roy - Pretty Woman [6401P rock A+] 126 dvd.mp4
6401 = year (but it's 1964 and it reached #1, if you see how this four space field has been manipulated)


one I'm not sure about? seeing how to separate out the year/position/???
how did you do it normally?

Are these separated into the correct ID3 tags in VDJ? IE: is the 'year' in the year TAG position? BPM in the BPM tag?
 
Hippydog: The file name and the mp4 year tag are identical. The year field and the year tag are four digits and in the YEAR choice.

8901 means in 1989 the track reached #1

9652 means in 1996 the track reached #52

1199 means in 2011 the track did not chart (??99 means did make Billboard's charts)

1300 means in 2013 the track has not been charted yet (??00 means it's too soon for final Billboard charted position)

So what I'd like is something like :

from all years greater than 80 (first two digits of the four digit year) but less than 89 (first two digits of a four digit year), give me all charted tracks 01 (second two digits of the four digit year) through 40 (second two digits of the four digit year).

Ideally, this would give every top 40 track in my collection from 1980 to 1989.

I use Mp3Tag&Rename, understand it completely, can do edits on 17,000 files at once (batch) if needs be. I make copies of each drive's xml file and using Notepad++, I can change anything or everything with the search and replace commands.

Wild cards would make it simple. Any program that does similar constructions generally accepts/incorporates wild cards. Hell, even BPM Studio did.

Any ideas?
 
Here's the tagging string I use in MP3Tag Ver 2.54:

%artist% - %title% [%year% %genre%] %bpm% %album%

where: artist is ARTIST; title is TITLE; year is YEAR; genre is GENRE (actually it's the dance step done to the track); bpm is BPM; and album is ALBUM (actually the source of the video file e.g. Promo Only is po, TM Studios is tms, TopHitsUsa is usa, and so on.)

Again, thanks for the learned responses. Begrudgingly, it looks like I may have to revise all my file names, then the tags, then rescan.

Scumber!
 
I posted this conundrum in the EXP forum.. IE: hopefully some of the more experienced people/programmers can chime in..

maybe someone smarter then me can 'think out of the box' & find a solution ..


I think the other tags are fine..
its just the YEAR tag thats tough as we have to filter out two pieces of info..

its a head scratcher... :-(
 
Hippydog: Thank you for not telling me to throw out the baby AND the bath water.
 
Cap Capello wrote :

I use Mp3Tag&Rename, understand it completely, can do edits on 17,000 files at once (batch) if needs be. I make copies of each drive's xml file and using Notepad++, I can change anything or everything with the search and replace commands.




Sounds like you've got the tagging part down pat, and hopefully a wildcard workaround can be found for you.

I'm not sure if you've got a solution for the possible conflict in your tagging format down the track, what are you going to do when it's 2058 and 'Poor little fool' hits number 1 again? Although you may be able to tell the difference as it could be the (ultra-meggazMuggaz drunk & crap tubstep RE(fit-rub)RUN mix) that gives it away, hehe.

Sorry just thought I would attempt light comic relief to ease your tension ;)
 
I have never tried to use any wildcards, so maybe it will not work, but try this ..
filename contains "[8?0?? old skool" and filepath contains ".mp4"

filename contains "[8" and filename contains "old skool" will work for sure but thats not what you want.

The only issue that you will have (if the above works of course :) ) is that it will only provide the Top 9 instead of the Top 10.
But i would strongly recommend to use a Tag&Rename software and find a way to parse the filename to ID3Tags infos. Having Filter folders searching your entire Music Library matching the criteria, it might slow down the results and in some case will not provide all of them.


Wild cards can be used in search though, so if you type in search something like..
?[8?0???old skool*mp4 it will probably prvoide what you need
Then you can create Virtual Folders and drag n drop there the results of the Search. I suppose you old files will not change genre or Chart position in the future ;)
 
DJ Dad I've tried using the traditional wild cards long before posting the problem. Thanks for confirming they should work.

Disappointingly, the example you graciously provided reports syntax errors at every turn.

To be sure:

? = single character/space wild card
* = anything wild card

Is there a syntax problem when the file name or tag contains a bracket e.g. [ , or a ] ?

I deliberately avoided using ( , or a ) because those are generally illegal operands.
 
Yes, you are right about the wildcards, but it seems that they can not be used in Filter folders. I ve never tried them in the past to be honest, so i had to give it a try and confirm it.
However the workaround with using the SEARCH and creating Virtual Folders (red ones) should do the job for you.
 
@djdad

Could a Batch file be created to find and replace a List of file names in the xml database file using Notepad ++ in one operation?
 
There are two ways to look at this.

  1. If you are sure you want to use Virtual DJ as your software of choice then I would strongly suggest optimising your files to work best with the search engine of the software.
  2. The other option is to try and shoe horn your file names in to an alien system.

I spent a very long time deciding how to organise my files. I took the following decisions:

  1. If I use the file system to search, I nearly always search by artist or title. If not that, I traverse folders looking by album.
  2. If using software I will use search by properly populated ID3 tags.

To this end, the file name is formatted either as:

[disk][track] - [name] - [artist].mp3
or
[disk][track] - [name].mp3

The artist is excluded where the folder name contains the artist. Speaking of folders I categories as the following examples:

\chart\<album artist>\
\artist\<album>\
\group\<album>\
\label\<album artist>\<album>\
\remix services\<album artist>\<album>\
\compilations\<album>\
\singles\<artist>\<release>\
\remixes\<artist>\<release>\

This leads in to the 2nd point. I use MediaMonkey for many reasons. Mainly because of the many ways you can easily tag files (manually or by script) and secondly of its very powerful file renaming engine. Combined, I can achieve my 2 main goals.

Knowing this, I can very easily search using the optimised databases of both MediaMonkey and Virtual DJ, I very rarely run in to an issue.

Why am I saying all this? Sometimes you need to rethink your strategies. While your file naming seems obvious and logical from a visual perspective, you need to think about how the machine/software will use this.

You will see I make heavy use of <album artist>. This is great for organising the file system and in Virtual DJ I can use it to build filter folders for example:

filepath starts with "f:\labels\hed kandi" gives me every track I own from the Hed Kandi label.
filepath starts with "f:\charts\" gives me every track in the current charts (which I actively maintain.

My point? Don't be wedded to your file naming convention. With the right tools you can rename very quickly.

MediaMonkey now supports and tags MP4 files - You can even tag from file names in to the MediaMonkey database (other software titles are also available).

Think carefully. You obviously care about the quality of your library. If this is the case you should be open to change and willing to do what's best.

If possible, work on a copy of your files so you can recover from any mistakes you may make.

Hope this helps,

Roy
 
Thanks Roy. Actually, the file names and tags worked nicely in several other tag using programs. But you are right. I love VDJ, and when they've got me by the balls, my heart and mind will follow.

It's pretty clear that my universal file naming protocol needs to be changed in relation to the YEAR field in lieu of typical syntax wildcards not being available or operational in this program.

The year field will be split in two.

I will now place the three digit charting position in the COMMENT field though that's a bit squeamish because there is a context menu command to batch remove anything in the COMMENT filed..

The YEAR field will be expanded to four digits.

Lastly, there'll probably to a post soon on the future developments section to allow wild card syntax for filter folders.

Thank you all.
 
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