Author Topic: Question on media attributes...  (Read 2486 times)

colinjones

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Question on media attributes...
« on: September 06, 2008, 07:59:43 am »
I am trying to (finally) tidy up all the media attributes in my database... I have never been able to use the Title/Performer/Genre sort mode effectively because the results were always inconsistent. I presumed that was because the attributes were a bit of a mess (which they are) and it is a big job to sort them all out.

But i have noticed some unexpected (to me) behaviour. Sometimes, for instance, performers do not appear in the Performer sort mode which definitely exist in the database. After a bit of experimentation, it seems that if the performer attribute is set against the directory only (ie the media file itself does not have the attribute) then the performer will not appear. As soon as you add the same attribute to the media file, the performer appears.

Fine I thought, I'll set the attribute on both. But then in Genre mode, if the genre is set on both directory and file, then both appear in a sort, whereas performer only appears once (against the file) even if set against both file and directory.

So it seems that I need to set the cover art against both files and directories, but performers only against the files. Genre's can be either or both it seems. Is this everybody else's experience? How do you resolve this - I really don't want to have a complex set of rules as to which I need to set which attributes against. Seems to me that this could be a complexity caused by the select queries the Orbiter uses - is this perhaps something that could be made more consistent in the Orbiter code so that the results of sorts are more consistent? I haven't checked filters or searches closely yet...

Crumble

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Re: Question on media attributes...
« Reply #1 on: September 08, 2008, 08:56:34 am »
might be an if then go to problem (though i doubt it).  I haven't tried adding music to my system yet, do you get the same problem if you say share this stuff out then look at it through windows media player?  It may be a cataloging issue as well, ive noticed that some dvd players dont write certain attributes on a cd that is burned even if you tell it to.  The same goes with ripping, im not sure of the details but i produce music and noticed this a couple of times on older drives (were talking at least 5-8 years).



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colinjones

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Re: Question on media attributes...
« Reply #2 on: September 08, 2008, 10:39:08 am »
No, this is an Orbiter coding behaviour, it is nothing to do with the actual tagging on the files, the orbiter issues SQL queries (I believe) against the media database running in MySQL, based on those queries it populates the data grid. I believe that it is to do with the logic of the exact queries it is issuing ...