Artist info and linking artists

Two thoughts I had:

1. I'd like the ability to write info about particular artists that aren't tied to a specific album so that no matter what album of theirs I brought up, I could have access to this common artist info. Some people may just cut-and-paste from All Music or an artist bio from a web site, but I'd use it to write personal opinions about an artist or my experiences with them if I'd met them/collected their music for a while.

2. I'd also like the ability to connect artists. Especially with jazz I'd like to be able to group albums released by "Benny Goodman" with "The Benny Goodman Orchestra," etc. It may seem obvious that these would already be grouped together alphabetically, but that wouldn't always be the case (for instance, linking Phil Collins and Genesis). I'm not exactly sure the best way to implement this, but I thought I'd put it out there.

You can already achieve (1). In the 'tree' view, right click on an artist, go to 'Artist Profile' and click. This brings up a dialogue box with a number of tabs. These include 'Biography', and 'Notes'. You can put all the common info you want in these fields. When you subsequently bring up an album by a particular artist in 'album' view, simply right click anywhere on the album page and select the option 'Artist Profile'. Voila!

Regarding (2), you could use the 'sub genre' field, for instance (well, any field, really) to enter the 'linking' data (let's say GENESIS). Then run a search that looks for GENESIS. This will return all albums with GENESIS in the chosen field. A good field to use might be 'Key words' in the 'notes' section of album properties.

Hope this helps.

Re: 1 -- very cool. Exactly what I was looking for. Don't know how I missed it.

Re: 2 - I already use the subgenre field... in the past I used the "notes" section of an album, but it doesn't quite give the desired results.

Another use of suggestion #2 would be for artists that have had releases with slightly different spellings of their names (like Del, who's released under "Del the Funky Homosapien," "Del tha Funky Homosapien," and "Del the Funkee Homosapien").

Again, look under Artist Profile. There's a special section under the General tab to achieve what you want re. spellings (if I understand you correctly). Glad suggestion (1) worked! 8)

Blowers -- Is the artist notes and biography only available in the newest beta version of OCD? In 5.2.0, all I see under Artist Properties is General (which allows me to link mispellings -- thanks!), Statistics, and Web Pages, but no notes or bio...

That could well be the case - I can't remember! It has certainly been there for a few of the pre-betas now, and is definitely there on mine (the latest), along with plenty of other goodies (additional customisable fields etc). I have had no problems running the pre-betas (except for the player crashing, but that is fixed in the latest) - why not download and give it a try? Probably best to back up OCDB thoroughly first! :)

Laze....Further to this, I've just checked back in the pre-beta notes, and it appears to have surfaced in build 8721 (March 22). The latest is build 9114 (July 14), and there should be another very soon (bit like waiting for a bus).....

Yeah, I've been meaning to give it a shot, just haven't had a chance yet. I'll download it tonight and see how it goes...

Thanks!