Hi, I was going through my pick list for instruments and noticed a few things.
I wanted to merge ‘Acoustic Guitar’ and ‘Akoestische gitaar’ to the latter (I want it all in Dutch), but after merging them to the latter, they are still both there in the list, each with a count of 21.
Now I should add that I think I first renamed the English name of the instrument into Dutch, but I can’t really remember what I did. This may have F88d things up (and explain the identical count of 21). Any ideas on how to fix this?
After a Merge operation, the list’s sorting goes back to the top to the letter ‘A’ and I have scroll down again to where I was, which is a long way if you are at ‘Viool’.
To continue: could it be that the presence of a comma or a space in an instrument’s name (as in Bas, zang) messes things up? I noticed that merge mode did work with commaless items in the vinyl colour list. There, merging zw, Zw and Zwart to Zwart left only Zwart with an updated count. But in the Instruments list, I tried to merge Bassybthesizer with Bassynthesizer to the latter (as the former was misspelled) but they both remained as they were before, even though I deleted both the commas and the spaces. I checked the manual (it even gave misspellings as an example) and as far as I can tell I am not doing anything wrong. But meybe I am…
Continued: When I first correct the wrong spelling of Bassybthesizer, the two are automatically merged. So, that’s sort of a workaround in some cases, I guess.
It looks like the merging in Instruments is broken. I’ve taken note of it as a bug.
Renaming an instrument to whatever you already have, does work and merges them it seems, so that is your workaround for instruments.
Scrolling to top:
As for scrolling to top after merge is done, I agree staying with the item you’re merged to, or scroll position, would be nice.
Often when things are merged people use a search, and then you don’t have to scroll that far. That said, Akoestisch and Acoustic can’t both be searched, so that isn’t really doable then. So I’ll put that to-do, to keep scroll position.
If you would merge from “Violin” to “AAAAA”, but you are scrolled to “Violin” - and violin would disappear, would you expect it to scroll to whatever you merged it TO just now? With the updated number?
No, I would like it to scroll to the next possible value to Violin. You see, I’m doing a clean-up job to my Instruments list, (I used to have combis like, Guitar, Vocals, Bass and I want every instrument to be one value only; and I’m also changing all names into Dutch) so I’d just like to pick up where I left off.
The combis make doing a search less effective: If I have ‘Gitaar, zang’ a search for ‘zang’ will stop at the first occcurrence, which would be at G, not at Z. Once I’m done cleaning up, that won’t be a problem anymore.
By the way, I found a convenient way to make some of the changes by choosing Instruments as folder view, allowing me to quickly identify occurrences of ‘mixed’ instruments that appear only once or twice and the changing the fields in the associated albums.
Thanks for your response and willingness to correct/change things.
I second the idea of staying at the last location after a merge. The other issue is if I’m looking thru the list and find two items to merge, I would like to select them and then hit the merge button and have it do it. Currently if you select two items and hit the merge button, it takes you back to the top, puts you in merge mode and you have to scroll back down, reselect them and then hit the merge button again.
Weird. I did recognise what KenHunter described: selecting two items and then hit the merge button (which doesn’t work) but I can’t remember when I did this nor can I reproduce the situation. But I distinctly remember finding out I had to hit Merge before selecting items, because I tried what Ken described. Maybe he can tell us how it happens with him.
Found it! Example: If in Managing Pick Lists, say Instruments, I search for “Vib” I get a small window listing Vibes and Vibrafoon. And the Merge Mode button is there, even though no items are selected. And of course it doesn’t work. So I guess it shouldn’t be there when you’ve done a search…
The problem is when I find two items that need to be merged when I hit the merge mode button it goes back to the top and I have to scroll down thru again or search to get back to the items. Why can’t I stay where I am in the list so I can just select the items and merge them.
The Merge Mode button SHOULD be there, because that takes you to Merge Mode.
And yes, that also should be there when you’ve done a search. And also when no items are selected.