This is great Erland! I am huge Jazz collector and have with the same challenges that ymilner and emalvick have been describing.
I listen to Jazz 3 ways although predominantly complete albums: 1) play a specific album of my choosing either browsing by artist (more on that below) or searching by album name 2) Dynamic Playlist of Albums when I am lazy and don't feel like selecting a speciic album I will dynamic playlist either focused on albums added to my collection most recently as I am interested in becoming more familiar with them or ones I have not been played recently or least played as I trying to find the lost gems and keep good rotation in my listening. 3) Dynamic / SQL playlist of songs filtered by various genres (which in my collection includes all the various sub-styles that others have listed like Bop, Fusion, etc.). This is predominantly for when we are entertaining guests at the house and it is important to filter out some of the more challenging styles to listen to. Not too many of our guests will groove to Miles Runs the Voodoo Down. So to add to the points made by ymilner and emalvick, having a good way to help characterize the style and mood is really helpful for my scenario 3 where I want to filter for a mix. And then we get to my biggest challenge of all which is the question of Artist. There is a lot of mixing of various Artists on Jazz recordings. Although there are some bands that have recorded multiple albums as a cohesive group this not the nearly the norm that you find in Rock/Pop. It is just as common to have a group like Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers where the sidemen in the group often change. As has been mentioned there is often a clear lead Artist, but not always. Sometimes there are multiple lead artist who have equal billing on the album cover. Other times there will be a clear lead artist with a clear co credit like Thelonious Monk with Sonny Rollins. There will often be additional sidemen who listed in the credits but not as a headline on the album cover. And then there are of course the super group type recordings where either every member of the band is listed as a headline on the album cover or they may have recorded under a clever name like "The Quintet." When I browse by an Artist I would like to see not only all recordings where they are the lead, but also any recording where they played as a sideman, guest or any performing role of any kind. However, when I am looking at the list of Album Titles for the selected artist, I would prefer to see the Artist listed as it appears on the headline of the album cover even if the headline does not include the Artist I have selected as that is an easy way to see that the selected Artist was just a sideman or guest on that particular recording of someone else. I can provide some examples if that is not clear. To facilitate this in my collection now I have been moving to only capturing a lead artist on Track Artist so when I convert to MP3's for my iPod I can easily browse by artist since iPod multiple artist like SBS. I include the additional contributors as multiple Band tags and have SBS configured to treat them as Artists. I have also tried using Album Artist to capture the Artist as listed on the headline of the Album cover when it is different than the lead Artist, but I have not been consistent and as a result things are bit messy. It would be great to have a real clean way to capture: 1. Lead Artist 2. Artist as it appears as the Album Cover (my preferred way to display Artist for the currently playing track or any listing of albums) 3. All of the additional contributors on the recording with the instrument they play (which I can access from the detailed tag listing of any track and also search when browsing by Artist) Although it is true that in most cases Jazz musicians play a single instrument, there are plenty of exceptions with the most common being saxophonists who play both Alto, Tenor, and/or Soprano. Additionally I think it is nice to see the artist by instrument for the lesser know sidemen who may only be one album you own and I certainly won't remember that John Doe plays Bass. I will try to make some time to help. My programing experience is dated and academic at best, but I have stayed involved professionally on the functional side of software design and I am familiar with some of the UML constructs. Let me know how I can help. Thanks! -- mikes ------------------------------------------------------------------------ mikes's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=2427 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=81898 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/discuss
