Off topic not a problem @
dubwat I can split into own thread, and a topic others might find helpful too
Kodi Leia has some additional
artist properties - gender, type e.g. "person", "group", "orchestra", "choir" and disambiguation text (so you can tell John Williams the guitarist from his name sake that composes film scores). Sadly Estuary does not show this data on the Artist Info dialog (although another team member is looking at an improvement for that dialog) so it is no wonder that many users will not know anything about it! Other skins, like good old Confluence and Aeon Nox do show this new data, hopefully user interst will grow with time.
Like most other artist properties these do not come from the metadata tag embedded in music files, but are populated by scraping additional artist information either from online sites or from a local artist.nfo file. The Muiscbrainz site has this data for most artists, and scraping artists with the Universal Artist Scraper will fetch it. Our you can add it to the artist.nfo files and scrape those. If you have an older music database that you migrated to v18, and have not rescraped the artists then this data will be missing.
So first step is to determinie if you have scraped this data (by looking using a skin that shows it), or if not then re-scraping the artists is necessary. Use "Query Info for all" on the context menu when showing an artists node (list of artists) to do this.
Once populated you can then use gender rules in artists smartplaylists and custom nodes, on when using the sideblade filter on an artists node.
Quote:Would it filter a band who has a female singer as the lead?
It depends what gender you store for the band. Musicbrainz does not give artist type = "group" a gender, only type "person" has gender values hence the scraper won't do this, but there is nothing stopping you from using artist.nfo files to give the band whatever gender value you want.
I find filtering artists by gender really useful, I also put things into the <instrumments> field too, that can be a nice way to pick what I want to play. The key is to realise that you need to get additional artist data setup, and then you are away.
If you need more help then ask, I have just given broad brushstrokes. Perhaps someone might turn this thread into a pretty guide with screen shots and everything
