I’m trying to do a print of artists and their genres but just that - I do not want the albums themselves. I may well be being stupid but I can’t work out how to do it. I can create a preset with just those fields without a problem but it creates a line for each artist/genre/album which is useless to me. I need a way to ignore the actual albums and do a list which equates to one line for each artist showing artist name and genre.
Anyone point me in the right direction?
Cheers
I wonder if that’s possible. I think genre is specific to an album, not artist, since an artist may appear on albums in multiple genres. If you use any spreadsheet programs like excel or numbers, you could export the full list and filter it.
I would just export to text file (say tab delimited, as one example). Then import into Excel and delete any unwanted columns such as Artist.
If you don’t have Excel, Libre Office is a good free option. There are a couple of others that are free as well.
@ Antonmb
Genre should be specific to an artist with the possibility of sub-genre, possibly second genre, to an album. No-one thinks of an artist by multiple genres. Louis Armstrong will be automatically thought of as Jazz, Bessie Smith as Blues. They may well do the odd album outside of that (think Taylor Swift’s latest album) but that would be the exception.
However, since Genre will always be a unique item, as will artist, it should be easy to do a query listing on a one to one relationship. It appears impossible as everything is relating to an album which, if true, is poor design. I was doing databases for work and commercially 20+ years ago using Microsoft’s Access (from version 2.0 if you’re interested) and the users could do things like this relatively easily. Table relationships are basically one to one or one to many.
The current output gives me:
“Artist”,“Genre”
“AC/DC”,“Hard Rock”
“Afro Celt Sound System”,“Celtic”
“All About Eve”,“Goth Rock”
“All About Eve”,“Goth Rock”
“All About Eve”,“Goth Rock”
“All About Eve”,“Goth Rock”
“All About Eve”,“Space Rock”
“Altan”,“Celtic”
“Altan”,“Celtic”
“Tori Amos”,“Alternative Rock”
“Tori Amos”,“Alternative Rock”
“Tori Amos”,“Alternative Rock”
“Laurie Anderson”,“Electronic”
“Laurie Anderson”,“Avantgarde; Spoken Word”
“Leah Andreone”,“Alternative Rock”
“Daryl Anger”,“Compilation; Folk Rock”
“Anonymous 4”,“Medieval Chant & Polyphony”
“Anonymous 4”,“Medieval Chant & Polyphony”
“Anonymous 4”,“Medieval Chant & Polyphony”
“Anonymous 4”,“Medieval Chant & Polyphony”
“Any Trouble”,“New Wave”
“Any Trouble”,“New Wave”
“Any Trouble”,“New Wave”
“Any Trouble”,“New Wave”
Whereas I want:
“Artist”,“Genre”
“AC/DC”,“Hard Rock”
“Afro Celt Sound System”,“Celtic”
“All About Eve”,“Goth Rock”
“Altan”,“Celtic”
“Tori Amos”,“Alternative Rock”
“Laurie Anderson”,“Electronic”
“Laurie Anderson”,“Avantgarde; Spoken Word”
“Leah Andreone”,“Alternative Rock”
“Daryl Anger”,“Compilation; Folk Rock”
“Anonymous 4”,“Medieval Chant & Polyphony”
“Any Trouble”,“New Wave”
but sorted by Genre (the “one” (read “unique”) in this scenario)
Thanks but I don’t think you understood what I was asking about. As to your suggestion then, although you were obviously totally unaware of this, and absolutely no criticism is implied, you were involved with a Grandmother & eggs situation. Having worked in IT for in excess of 50 years I’m more than aware of what’s available out there as you have probably gathered.
But I do appreciate you taking the time and energy to try to assist.
Really? Is Wynton Marsalis a jazz artist or a classical artist? He’s both, and his many recordings in both genres attest to this. So is Andre Previn. Is Bob Dylan a folk singer or rocker? That depends on the stage of his career. These are not just a few exceptions, there are many artists who have recorded in multiple genres. You may like to think of an artist as being pegged to a genre, and that’s your personal preference, but the only way to effectively account for the many artists who record in multiple genres in a database like MuC is to attach the genre to the album, not the artist. Genre is specific to a performance or recording.
There we’ll have to disagree. For me Bob Dylan belongs in the singer-songwriter genre -pure and simple. If he does an album that significantly diverges from that, say an album of covers of Led Zeppelin, then a field within the album to link to a different genre would be fine but the overarching genre would still be singer-songwriter. This is why the principal genre should be attached to the artist, not the album.
As categorisation would be very subjective I wouldn’t want the software to designate the genre but to allow the individual specify as to how they see the artist. Obviously your categorisation would differ from mine for artists and that’s fine. What would happen is that each of us could query the database to find what we would expect to find but at the moment that isn’t possible.
Fortunately, the solution to your problem is trivial
(1) Export all your data to CSV. Include columns Artist and Genre. Any other columns will be ignored in step 3.
(2) Import into spreadsheet. I use LibreOffice Calc, but Google Sheets has similar features, as does Excel.
(3) Create a Pivot Table. [Insert | Pivot Table]. The Row Fields are Artist and Genre. The column and data fields are left blank.
(4) Voila.
I guess I wouldn’t categorize my artists at all, I’d categorize their albums by genre, since genre is a style of music, not a type of artist😎. Singer-songwriter is indeed a category of artist, it’s just not a genre. Leadbelly was a singer-sngwiter, wrote his own material, but I feel pretty safe marking his recordings as blues or folk. Hank Williams was also a singer-songwriter - I have his albums in country. Dylan’s first recordings were folk ballads, not his own. He then produced albums of his own material, but still in a folk idiom. Then he electrified and put out rock or folk-rock albums. Then came covers of more traditional folk ballads, and then standards, and a Christmas album. All of these belong to different genres.
I think it would be great if Alwin could give us a field tied to artist that could be used to categorize artists in a manner of anyone’s choosing, whether you like to peg them by genre, by style, by era, or whatever you want - but please leave the genre field as album-specific, which is how most of the world does it. In the meantime, you could use the musician field if you’re not already using it as intended: enter your artists in the musician field and the genre in the instrument field, it’s a clean relationship.
Moving on.
@ SteveJ
Many thanks Steve. That does exactly what I want - as you already knew of course 
Spreadsheets, although I use them for basic stuff (banking and the like) has never been an area of expertise for me so I’d never have worked that one out. I was halfway intending to import the relevant data into a new Access database although that would have meant reinstalling Office 2010 Pro (the latest version I own) which I wasn’t keen on. Like you, I’ve been using Libre Office for quite some time.
@ antonmb
We’re never going to agree on this subject which is perfectly ok - that’s people for you - but I would point out that record stores, where they didn’t display albums alphabetically, did so by genre so it isn’t as clear cut as you try to make it. Still, it’s nice to listen to alternate ways of looking at things so thanks for that 
In case anyone is wondering why I’m wanting to do this it’s for when I’m dead. The person who inherits my estate doesn’t have my fairly Catholic taste in music but is also aware of the approximate value of the collection. That person will want to keep genres that they like but as my artist collection is far from mainstream that person won’t be aware of many of those artists. By doing this listing they can easily see what they likely to like and can sell the rest having checked against my listed approximate valuations (they’ve been warned to expect offers of around 50% from dealers - have to keep their feet on the ground). It’s just to make their life a bit easier when the inevitable happens 
