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Topic: "Format from other fields" behavior (Read 894 times) previous topic - next topic
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"Format from other fields" behavior

Hi Peter and all the team.

I'm using Foobar2000 not only to play music, but also to organize my music lib. It's very fast and quite versatile. However I have a unfortunate behavior with the "Format from other fields" function. It may be by design or a bug. I'm only reporting because I find it annoying. Here's the context ...

In order to use filter and sort features quite easily, I've created a few extra fields/tags (e.g. xgenre, xlanguage, xinstruments, ...) where I place specific info for the songs. Works great with FB2000 (eg. I can have a filter like "%xinstruments% HAS Piano" or "xlive IS N"), less great with other programs that does not take non standards fields into account (eg. DS Audio).

The only way to allow these programs to view my data (hence to allow me to filter on it), is to reuse a standard field (i.e. genre, which is multi-values) to store all the extras tags and then use something like (genre contains "Piano") or (genre contains "Live"). Even if it works for a filter, this does not allow a program (eg. again DS Audio) which recognize genre as multi-values to automatically classify the information in categories.

So I fill my values in FB2000, an then I try to generate automatically the field "genre" using "Format from other fields". It works ... almost. My concern is that the result is a single value, not a set of values, even if the separator are semi-colons. And if the source field contained semi-colon multi-values, they are generated as single string with comma as separator.

Ex. a song with xgenre="Pop; Rock", xlanguage="German", xlive="Y" should also have genre="Pop; Rock; German; Live".

In the previous example, I would like to receive a multi-value field containing four values "Pop; Rock; German; Live" but actually I obtain only "Pop, Rock; German; Live" as a single value.

I hope I'm clear enough. It may be a bug or not. It can be quite complex as the source(s) can be single/multi value(s). Or you may consider it not worth the amount of work to make it.

Now, if I may go a bit further, an optimized solution could also be to have calculated fields, which will be the addition of the content of a few other fields. This way, we don't even need to use the "Format from other fields", because it's automatic.

Kind regards,
Luc

Re: "Format from other fields" behavior

Reply #1 –
Quote from: bollylu on
It may be by design or a bug.
It's by design. But you can execute "Split values" directly above "Format from other fields" afterwards. You can bundle this also together in a masstagger script.

Re: "Format from other fields" behavior

Reply #2 –
Thanks for the answer.

I'm not certain to see the rationale behind the "by design", but the trick that you mentioned does the job. It's only that I have to do two actions instead of one.

Kind regards,
Luc

Re: "Format from other fields" behavior

Reply #3 –
Quote from: bollylu on
I'm not certain to see the rationale behind the "by design"
Because it is not possible to return multiple values from a title format expression. It's always a single string.

Quote from: bollylu on
It's only that I have to do two actions instead of one.
Not if you create a masstagger script as mentioned.