[tralaralara]

Hello all

 apologies if this has been asked before, but I couldn't find any recent discussion in the forum regarding this.
 The Filter function in the music library allows, for example, to filter by Label (if files are appropriately tagged with the Record Label info, of course). I've now gone into the gigantic task of retagging all my files to include the label and catalog number info, because I would really like to be able to filter my music library using the label tag.

BUT

picard / MusicBrainz also has a tag for "releasecountry", and for me it would be a great plus to be able to filter by this tag. Let's say, I want to display only albums released in Lithuania for example. Is there a way to do this? Is it possible to add custom filters to the Filter function?

Thanks in advance

[scott967]

If you look in Musicbrainz forum, there's a lot of argument about what "release country" is supposed to signify/mean.   I'm not sure using the MB data for that tag is going to help much.  It's really a problem for digital releases.  It sounds like what you really are after is the country of the release (album) artist?

scott s.
.

[tralaralara]

If you look in Musicbrainz forum, there's a lot of argument about what "release country" is supposed to signify/mean.   I'm not sure using the MB data for that tag is going to help much.  It's really a problem for digital releases.  It sounds like what you really are after is the country of the release (album) artist?

scott s.
.

Thanks for answering. My issue is not so much about the tag itself, I use my own criteria and just change it to my liking if I don't fancy the info that MB provides.

What I want is to see the ability to filter by this tag in the Filter from the Context Menu in the music library.
 
See the screenshot attached -- you can filter by Artist, by year and even by label (which is fantastic!), but I'd like to see an option there to filter by country too. How can I achieve this?

[jjd-uk]

A couple of workarounds come to mind, the first depends on whether you want to make use of Genre in the Filter, as you could add Countries as genre tags, however although the Filter does allow selection of multiple genres it's an OR operation not an AND operation so would only be of used if you didn't want to use it for normal genres in combination with country genre's.

The other workaround is to have you music folders organised by country, so a folder which contains all your Lithuanian music, then add each country folder as a separate source which would allow you to make use of the Source option in the Filter.

[tralaralara]

TA couple of workarounds come to mind, the first depends on whether you want to make use of Genre in the Filter, as you could add Countries as genre tags, however although the Filter does allow selection of multiple genres it's an OR operation not an AND operation so would only be of used if you didn't want to use it for normal genres in combination with country genre's.

The other workaround is to have you music folders organised by country, so a folder which contains all your Lithuanian music, then add each country folder as a separate source which would allow you to make use of the Source option in the Filter.

Thanks for answering. I'd really want to be able to filter by genre and country ideally, so as to say for example show me all Jazz albums from Lithuania from 1950 to 1956. Being able to set several rules is what makes filtering FUN

The second one is a possibility, a messy one, but doable. I have at the moment music from 67 countries, and they are solted in folders matching the country. But having 67 different sources is kinda messy as I said.

The idea would be to add a filter option there which would look for the country tag and build a list of countries populating the values... is that doable?

 Thanks for your input!

[DaveBlake]

The problem here @tralaralara is like Scott said the country data for albums is generally poor even from Musicbrainz, it is also a non-standard tag (not part of the IDE3 v2.4 spec) and not widely used. As it is you are manually customising this tag from the values set by Picard to hold the values meaningful to you.  Also key is that you also want the country values enumerated (like sources, genres and years are). While that is certainly possible to do, again the lack of good release country data and user interest (you are the first I know of to ask) count against it happening.

Hence I am not enthusiastic to add processing for this tag data and yet another new column in the album table (and all the associated additions elsewhere). For you the key thing is country, for someone else it could be the recording studio etc. And if you are thinking hey unfair, you just added release status to v19 why not country, then all I can say is that status does have better data quailty than country.

I would rather we work on a general user customisable facility to be able to do this for any crazy thing a user wants. Read from tag, or modifiy from NFO/scraper/JSON, show on GUI, use as filter rule, enumerate values in a list. Unlikely for v19, but a nice todo for v20

[scott967]

My personal use is to use genre, but I think it's been wanted for a while to have a sub-genre or similar capability.

scott s.
.

[tralaralara]

I would rather we work on a general user customisable facility to be able to do this for any crazy thing a user wants. Read from tag, or modifiy from NFO/scraper/JSON, show on GUI, use as filter rule, enumerate values in a list. Unlikely for v19, but a nice todo for v20

I understand how bulky the options can become if all requests are implemented, specially those which are not very popular (like this one), and also your reasoning that generally country data is poor. I guess also partly because it's not a very used tad, and people mostly tag their files with the info from the database -- I write the tags myself so I make sure importance is given to the tags that are important to me; and country is one of them. For the time being I think I'll do as @jjd-uk suggested, and use the filter by path option adding the countries as sources. Over 100 sources would be very messy, but maybe I can add the 15 countries I have the most albums from, and the rest sort them out by Continent (such as "America - others" and so on). That would be only 20 sources in total, not so bad.


 The possible feature for v20 you mention sounds fantastic! And it would be useful to a lot more users I believe.

[.Erich]

I'm also very interested in some kind of country tag. Got a lot of artists belonging to the same genre and it would be very nice to further split them up by country.
Adding a source in the library for each country doesn't sound very convenient to me. Especially if you like to access your music files with a normal file browser not only with Kodi.
The lack of data from MB isn't really a problem for me since I tag most files by hand.
So I would be very pleased if this feature would find its way into v20. Thx

[DaveBlake]

Big difference between an artist having a country, and a release/album/song having a country.

Again, just geta scraper to put that value for artists or albums in one of the many fields you are n't using e.g. theme, mood, style.