[clug] Excluding tagless songs from amarok while sorting music

[Ian]

Hi all,

Last night at the CLUG meeting I was discussing some features of
Amarok with Nemo, and this situation was bought up:

Say I have a collection of songs compiled from a number of different
sources with a number of different methods used to sort each song,
including:
* Many songs with perfectly filled out ID3 tags, but no/poor
filesystem organisation.
* Many songs with no ID3 tags but good filesystem sorting with well
structured directory and filenames.

If one simply selects every song in such a collection and tells amarok
to organise the files, the result will be:
* Songs with good ID3 tags will be well sorted
(Initial/Artist/Album/Track - Title).
* Songs with no ID3 tags will be dumped in the destination directory,
losing the information from their original directories. Filenames will
remain intact (though I have noticed some end up with blah.mp3.mp3,
but that's easily fixed with mmv, or one of the various batch rename
GUI frontends).

I could recall when I faced this same task I had used a filter on my
collection to exclude tracks with no ID3 tags from the organisation,
then inverted the filter and used Amarok's various "fill in tags
using..." features to tag the rest of the songs so they could also be
organised. I couldn't recall last night what the filter I had used
was. I've remembered now and I figured I'd let everyone know:


To exclude tracks with no artist/album information to sort the rest
use this collection filter:
 -artist:unknown -album:unknown
This will also exclude artists & albums that actually have the word
"unknown" in them, but for me this was only a few and didn't bother me
(see below), still if anyone can suggest a better filter let me know.

To only match the tracks excluded above to go through them and use the
"fill in tags from filename/musicbrainz" and bulk tag editing features
simply invert the filter:
 artist:unknown album:unknown
I found it handy to then clear my playlist and add all matched tracks
to it (enabling the directory and filename columns) so I could make
the most out of the bulk tag editing features. Doing so also allowed
my to sort by various properties - eg, sort by artist/album to find
tracks that have the word "unknown" in the tags so I could have amarok
organise them.


Depending on the existing directory structure, one may also find
adding directory: filters to the above helpful.


Cheers,
-Ian
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