Tutorial: Working with multiple genres, actors, artists, etc.

Mezzmo collects metadata that is embedded in your media files, from external metadata files and from web sites. Sometimes the metadata collected contains multiple values combined into one single entry. For example:

• Genre: Horror/Comedy/Drama
• Artist: Paul McCartney;Stevie Wonder
• Actors: Leonardo DiCaprio|Joseph Gordon-Levitt|Ellen Page
• Composers: Paul McCartney/John Lennon

Mezzmo parses these single values and splits them into comma-delimited, separate values - e.g. Horror, Comedy, Drama. This allows Mezzmo to list the genres, actors, artists, etc. separately in active playlists for convenient browsing in Mezzmo and on your devices.

Mezzmo parses metadata values using the following delimiter characters: /|;,

Tip: If you have metadata for a media file that should contain delimiter character(s), then you can override Mezzmo's metadata parsing by using quotes ("). For example, to stop the artist Emerson, Lake & Palmer from being split into multiple artists, you can right-click on the media file in Mezzmo and click Properties. In the Properties dialog, put quotes around the artist name - e.g. "Emerson, Lake & Palmer". This will group the artist into a single entry and stop any automatic splitting by Mezzmo.

Multi-value attributes in Mezzmo are album, album artist, artist, actor, category, creator, director, genre, keyword, producer, production company and writer.

When you wish to test for certain values of a multi-value attribute in a smart playlist or smart filter in an active playlist, you should typically use the [contains] or [does not contain] operators.

For example, to find all files that have a certain set of genres:

[x] Match [all] of the following rules:
[Genre] [contains] [Drama]
[Genre] [contains] [Comedy]
[Genre] [contains] [Fantasy]

Or, to exclude all files that have certain actors:

[x] Match [any] the following rules:
[Artist / Actors] [does not contain] [Brad Pitt]
[Artist / Actors] [does not contain] [Tom Hanks]

If you wish to make an exact match, then you can use the [is] or [is not] operators. These are used when you wish to test for files with an attribute that has a single value.

For example, to find all files that have one particular genre:

[x] Match [all] of the following rules:
[Genre] [is] [Drama]

This will match all files that have the genre of Drama. It will not match files that have multiple genres, even though one of the values may be Drama.