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Author: paq

Description

So, I guess there's not that much new music out yet in 2013 and while we're waiting for it - why not make a "best of"-playlist for last year? This tutorial will give you some tips and tricks about MusicBee and hopefully inspire you to be creative with MusicBee on your own, while reflecting over some music organizing topics. It is not meant to be a step-by-step-guide for beginners, but rather a smorgasbord of ideas. To reduce clutter, you'll find all the extra hints simply if you hover your mouse over any below.

What you need
  • MusicBee (of course), version 2.0.4865 or later. The newer, the better.
  • 1 Virtual Tag
  • 1 Sorting Set (optional)
What to do
1. Deciding

First off, we need to decide some things. Do we want the best tracks added in 2012 or the best tracks released in 2012? Also, what defines the best tracks? Here are some ideas to get you started:

The best tracks for me are tracks where one, any or a combination of the following criteria are met:

  • Rated with 5 stars
  • Has the Love flag
  • On an album with an Album Rating of at least 4 stars
  • Has the highest play count
  • Has the lowest skip count
2. Ruling

Next, we need to create an auto-playlist and fill in some rules. Depending on your choices above, the rules will be different. Here are two examples.

Example 1: Tracks added in 2012 with a rating of 5 stars or the love icon

Library: music library; inbox. Match all of the following rules:

  • Date Added is after 2012-01-01
  • Date Added is before 2013-01-01 and: any of Rating is '5', Love is 'L'

Example 2: The 100 most listened to tracks released in 2012

Library: music library; inbox. Match all of the following rules:

  • Year is 2012
  • limit to 100 items selected by most often played
3. Grouping

Now we want to display the tracks grouped by the month when we probably listened to them most, that is when they were added.

  • Make sure the view for your list is set to Track Detail
  • Create the following virtual tag: label: Month Added; formula: $Date(<Date Added>,MMMM)
  • Right-click any of the column headers and choose "Group By> Month Added".
4. Sorting

Not only do we need to group the tracks, but also sort them to make it look nice. Normally you can choose to sort your list by the same field you use for grouping, but since the month is a string, it will not make sense. There's two ways to fix this:

  • Simply choose to display the Date Added field and click it to sort the list, or
  • Create a sorting set with only <Date Added> (ascending) then choose it from the Sort By menu

If you rather want to sort your list by release date, you need to either fill out your <Year> tags with complete values ("2012-10-13") or create a custom tag with that information for each track, and sort by that instead.

What you could end up with:

Ht best 1

Feel free to post screenshots of your "best of"-lists, your set of rules for "best tracks" or any other tips on how this can be improved.

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