On rare occasions MBP comes back with an Album Artist and/or Album Artist Sort containing multiple values
Example: Album: Le nozze di Figaro Release ID: 95b41cb5-32a6-4ff1-bc26-0817beae38c3 Album Artist: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart; Ildebrando d’Arcangelo, Anna Netrebko, Konzertvereinigung Wiener Staatsopernchor, Dorothea Röschmann, Christine Schäfer, Konzertvereinigung Wiener Staatsopernchor, Wiener Philharmoniker, Nikolaus Harnoncourt Album Artist Sort: Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus; d’Arcangelo, Ildebrando, Netrebko, Anna Yur’yevna, Skovhus, Bo, Röschmann, Dorothea, Schäfer, Christine, Chor der Wiener Staatsoper, Wiener Philharmoniker, Harnoncourt, Nikolaus
Is there anyway to script it so MB will give me the first entries only?
You may want to look at the Classical Extras plugin. Those Classical albums are filed in a different way and the plugin does sensible things with assigning the names you require in the various tags.
I don’t use the plugin myself yet so can’t advise further.
Its ok im not really into my classical music, i’ve probably only half a dozen classical albums in my collection so want to treat them the same as all other genres
i was reading about the $if2(a1,a2 variable and trying to get that to give me the first value in a multi-value list but i suck at scripting so failed miserably
When it comes to classical music, the albumartist and albumartistsort tags tend to have a comma-and-space separated list of composers, then a semicolon and space, then a comma-and-space separated list of performers. I only wanted the composers, and this did the trick. It looks for a semicolon followed by a space, and deletes them along with whatever else comes after them.
I haven’t tried it, so I can’t guarantee it will work. How regular expressions generally work, if you list characters within square brackets, then it will match any of them, so this should (hopefully) delete a semicolon or ampersand, and whatever’s after it. I explain this in much more detail in a guide to regular expressions I wrote a while back, but I can’t imagine you’d be likely to want to read all that right now! Hopefully the above example will work.