[Bob in St. Louis]

Hey folks,

Goal - To have all my audiophile reference compilation Cd's grouped in one place on the SqueezeBox.

I would like to make a folder in SqueezeCenter (SC) for Demo reference Cd's I've been collecting from various places. My goal is to have them all lumped into one easy to find place. To me, it doesn't matter if the discs are filled under an artist category, or genre category. Just as long as they're in one place.
This seems like such an easy task........

First, I went to the Windows Explorer folder where all my music is stored and created a new folder (a new "artist", if you will) called "DEMO". My assumption was that I'd have an 'artist' named "DEMO" and in this folder is where they'd all be dumped. Then I clicked and dragged a few entire albums in there. Next, I went to SC (version 6.5.4) and rescanned the library.
No difference. The albums are still located where they've always been, and there is no artist named "DEMO".

I have Media Monkey (v3.4.0.1185), so I went there to see what it looks like. Sure enough, there's an artist called "DEMO" and the three compilation discs I moved are all under artist name "DEMO". PERFECT, this is exactly what I want.
I also have Foobar 2000 (v0.9.5.3), and it does NOT show an artist named "DEMO". It shows the discs I had moved back in their original locations.
Of course I know to rescan each and every library after any changes are made.

Any ideas? Or am I going about this in the wrong way to begin with?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Bob

[BradJudy]

It sounds like you aren't changing the actual tags on the files, just the directory name.  You need to use one of the many pieces of tagging software to change the artist name to "demo" (personally, I'd change the genre to "demo" so the artist info still appears properly on the display).  If you change the artist name, be sure to change it for both the track artist field as well as the album artist field (a particular issue for compilations). 

[zybar]

Why wouldn't you just create a playlist that has all your demo cd's in it?

This way you don't lose all the artist information.

I have done this and it works like a charm.

George

[PhilNYC]

Why wouldn't you just create a playlist that has all your demo cd's in it?

This way you don't lose all the artist information.

I have done this and it works like a charm.

George

A playlist will list individual songs, not full CDs/albums...it sounds like Bob wants the CDs/albums listed...

One way to do that would be to change the name of the CDs/albums...put a "REFCD" at the start of the album title so that all of them get listed together...

[Bob in St. Louis]

Brad, I think you're right. I shouldn't be changing the artist info. That's just going to jumble it all up and make a mess.

George, I'm a little embarrassed to say, but I've not been able to create a playlist....  
Now granted, I've spent a total of about 30 seconds researching how to create a playlists.
Are there "preferred" ways of creating them? I assume there's a dozen different ways just like everything else regarding music servers and SB's?


Thanks for the speedy replies!
Bob

EDIT: Interesting idea Phil. Then I could simply look for albums starting with "REFCD", or "DEMO", or whatever. That's definitely easy enough.

[PhilNYC]

One more suggestion...do you use the "Favorites" feature on your SB?  If not, you could use Favorites as the place to keep all your reference CDs....

[Bob in St. Louis]

Another good idea Phil. That's yet another area I've yet to explore in the SB.
Ok, I can see now that I've greatly overcomplicated things by messing around in areas that don't need to be messed with.
Time to get the SB book out and read it.
From the first day the SB was operational, that's as far as I got with my education. I simply enjoyed the ability to use it as a basic interface. Now that it's time to use some of the more advances features of the unit I should get my fingers out of places they don't belong and read the manual. 

Thanks for the large dose of reality guys. 
You've humbled me with common sense. Dammit, I hate it when that happens.   

Bob

[ted_b]

Yes, I would either use "favorites" or if feeling confident in tag changes, go ahead and change genre to "demo" cuz genre is a menu choice. 

I use playlists for certain stuff, but to use it to store all your demo cd's would be tough I would think (it's been pointed out it is track-based).  But I do love to use my playlist called "evaluation" which contains all my fave demo cuts that I use to evaluate system changes, tube rolling, etc. 

[GBB]

. . . if feeling confident in tag changes, go ahead and change genre to "demo" cuz genre is a menu choice. 

That's what I would recommend as well.  Changing genre is a snap with a tool that I use when I'm having problems with tags - MP3TAG.  It's freeware that can be downloaded here:  http://www.mp3tag.de/en/

One just points the tool to the folder with the album in question, selects all the songs from that album, and then change genre to "demo" or whatever you chose and then hit CTL-S to save the new tags and you're done.

---Gary

[Bob in St. Louis]

Alright, Nice!. Thanks Ted and Gary.  I'm liking the idea of it being genre based instead of track based. Having a couple hundred reference songs "dumped" in one bag called 'playlist' doesn't sound as convenient as having the demo tunes under it's own genre.
Thanks for the tagging link Gary.

Gotta go cut the grass now. 

Bob

[Len_Dreyer]

You can have multiple playlists, one named "Demos". Keeping the genre info might be nice if you wanted to only demo rock cuts etc.  Unfortunately, all my playlists are imported from iTunes so I don't know how to specifically set one up in Squeeze Center.