Hi there Zowie,

I think calling my objection "hyperbolic" was understating it a bit

We've just got pretty much irreconcilable differences here. There's no absolute physical law we can use to determine an objective "right" way of doing it. It's like the righteously self-confident Wanda Landowska said at the end of argument with another musician about how to interpret Bach, "Oh well, you'll just have to go on playing Bach your way, and I'll go on playing Bach his way."

I guess one can put Composer in the Artist field, and Performer in the Title field, and Release Date in the Recorded Date field (and any other combination of Field Names vs. Field Contents) provided one is consistent and knows instinctively where to look for the data.

Will people generations hence look back and try to find the point at which evolutionary forces created the two species out of one: artists becoming the artist-performers and the artist-composers? And which one will be the fittest and ultimately survive? Or will they happily co-exist in two different ecological niches?

No lasting damage done, that's the main thing.

Regards and best wishes

Ken

True.

This has been a real buggaboo for me. I have spent hours modifying catraxx in an effort to catalogue my classical library. I came up with an answer that I completed about a year ago so I really don't remember everything I did. I know I completely redesigned the fields within the album and tracks view. There is a "version" field on the individual track page for opus and Kv numbers. I wholeheartedly disagree with putting composers in the artist field. I did not fully unnerstand some of the solutions posted in this thread as this is all a little complicated. The lookup for any classical work is almost always by Composer. I used the composer field exclusively in the grouping definitions that appear to the left. Whenever a composer is selected ALL albums which that composer appears is listed to the right in the list layout. The desired album can then be selected where you can play the whole thing or select the tracks in the explorer view at the bottom. This is a great way to facilitate compilation albums which contain more than one composer. It also does NOT require the composer's name to be included in the title. The only thing that one must be careful with is to always enter a composer's name the same way. If you have an album/track with WA Mozart and another one with Mozart,WA then both will appear in the grouping definition to the left as different composers. You can see how that could become a real problem very quickly.

I wish I could upload my .mdb to this forum so you guys could open it in Catraxx and see if it would work for you. It would be easy to delete my recordings and replace them with your own.

Cheers

Yay!! There's two of us!
Don't despair Crudge, we'll win the others over yet.

Have you tried saving your database design as a template? A template contains the basic definitions you have applied to fields and forms but none of the bulky data itself. You should be able to attach a template relatively easily here. Other users can generate a new database based on your template and populate it with their own information (manually or by transfer from their existing databases) to evaluate it.

Alternatively create a cut-down version of your database with only a few records and load it to a public folder in DropBox. Dave (LotsOCds) suggested this to me and I followed up here

Regards

Ken

Okay, I did the dropbox thing.
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/80051254/newclassical.mdb - Sample
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/80051254/classical.mdb - Complete Library

I sure hope this helps somebody. It took a little work.
If folks use the CDDB for downloading it is going to
necessitate quite a bit of editing for the downloads to
work within my DB.

Any questions??

I am going to give your .mdb a try.

Thanks

Are you in "Album View" when you want to play the entire work? The title of the album should be in the main window and clicking the little speaker next to the title will play the whole thing. You can even select or skip movements as you desire in the play list.

Hi there

That post you quoted was in November 2010 and a lot of XSL code has been fractured and wrought since then!

As standard CATraxx provides for the single-click playing of a track or an album. Playing multiple tracks requires multiple selections. Being lazy, I wanted the single-click facility to play any given classical work in its entirety - no matter how many tracks it comprised, or how many other unrelated tracks were on the same album.

Have a look at this, admittedly lengthy, thread that began in June 2011 and staggered on to March 2012. I appreciate it's a lot to take in at once. With a lot of help from others (Dave, Fredrik, Litago, Les) I eventually achieved what I wanted. None of this is done from standard Views, everything is handled in explorer pages.

I'll admit the thought processes during these months were not entirely linear at times. If you need any explanations to help comprehension just ask away.

Regards

Ken

Yeah, I shoulda checked the date.