# Combined Credits Editor

Quick jumps to sections:

Introduction

Formatting in Simple Fields

About the Use of Commas

The Display ... a Summary

The Files Panel

The Known Credits Panel

The Track Credits Panel

## Introduction

The Combined Credits Editor, or CCE, was designed to solve three issues:

1. When looking at credits on an album, they are often described on a per track basis. For example CD credits may describe John Doe as vocals on all tracks and guitar on track 4. As there are rarely completely separate descriptions for each track, this layout of information makes it difficult to enter in Involved People or Musician Credits as the file selection may have to continuously change. The CCE hopefully makes it easier to specify which tracks are relevant when adding new items.
2. Users of Roon are faced with thousands of Roon standard credits which must be specified exactly or they will not appear. Hopefully, we've made sense of this process. We've built in a number of functions to make it easier to transition manually entered text to something Roon will recognize.
3. The Discogs API does not differentiate between credits which are instrument or involvement based. Prior to Yate v3.16, the Discogs Preferences enabled you to edit the Discogs credit mappings and to assign specific Discogs Credits to Composer, Conductor, Lyricist and Remixer as well as to Involved People and Musician Credits. This functionality has been moved into the CCE where you can also alias one role to another.

The CCE manipulates all credit oriented fields. This includes: Involved People, Musician Credits, Album Artist, Artist, Conductor, Composer, Lyricist, Original Artist, Original Lyricist and Remixer. Further, any Custom Field which is marked as being a credit, is also processed. Custom fields may be marked as being credits when they are defined in the Custom Field Editor

Undo is implemented in the CCE.

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## Formatting in Simple Fields

Simple fields are any fields except for Involved People and Musician Credits, which are compound fields. Unlike the compound fields, the simple fields do not have a rigid format specification. While values may be separated by the multi value delimiter, often commas or other character sequences are used as delimiters. Further, qualifying words such as "featuring" may also be used as delimiters. By default the CCE will only distinguish items in simple fields if they are separated by the multi value delimiter. However, if you use alternate formatting you can override the default behaviour in Preferences - Credits Editor.

The processing of simple fields is initially disabled.

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## About the Use of Commas

The Involved People and Musician Credits fields use commas as delimiters. In order to protect your manually entered person and credit data from being split into components, commas will automatically be replaced with ‚ characters. This alternate comma (Unicode 201A) should display properly pretty much everywhere.

When substituting commas, commas enclosed in square bracket sequences [ ... ] will be left intact and ignored. This is due to the fact that Discogs credit qualifiers may contain items separated by commas. When processing Involved People and Musician Credits, Yate will not treat these enclosed commas as delimiters.

There is only one exception to the automatic substitution rule. The exception is when you are adding new credits to the Tracks Credits table. Each item you create is a single entity, so it is safe to assume that the comma is desired.

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## The Display ... a Summmary

The display is divided into three vertical panels summarized below.

The leftmost panel is the files panel and contains a list of all files which were selected when you opened the CCE. Each row in the panel's table describes a file. The panel is always sorted by Album, Disc Number, Track Number. A file with no Disc Number will automatically use 1. This order was chosen to make it easier to quickly locate specified track designations within a list of credits. Each file is preceded by a checkbox. This checkbox is used to denote selected for a number of CCE functions. The standard highlight table selection method is used to quickly show which files contain a credit without changing the actual function oriented selection.

The middle panel describes the known credits. This is the list of credits which are predefined and those you add. The Status column describes various tidbits of information on the credit. While the indicators are somewhat cryptic for space reasons, you can always hover over the Status column header for a tooltip describing the indicators. The other columns describe the Credit name and an optional alias value. Note that all Roon credits which are aliases have the Alias Of column populated with the name of the canonical credit. The Alias Of column represents originals. The extremely long list of credits can be filtered based on a wide variety of criteria. This panel is the primary means of manually creating or editing credits. If you open the CCE without any files selected, this will be the only panel with content.

The rightmost panel describes the credits extracted from tracks. The first column contains an image describing if the credit is in all file (solid circle) or not in all files (half filled circle). The Status column describes various tidbits of information on the credit. While the indicators are somewhat cryptic for space reasons, you can always hover over the Status column header for a tooltip describing the indicators. The other columns describe a person and an associated credit. The word person can be taken lightly. Person can also be a group, band, etc.

When you close the CCE you have three choices:

> Rebuild All Credit Fields & Close
>   The credit fields of all open displayed files will be rebuilt with the displayed credits and according to the delimiter rules in effect.
> Cancel
>   All changes you have made will be discarded.
> Partial Cancel
>   All track credit changes will be discarded. Known credit changes will be retained.

The size of the font displayed in the three tables can be adjusted by the Font>Bigger and Font>Smaller menu items.

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## The Files Panel

The Files panel describes the list of available files. You can select or deselect an individual file by clicking on the checkbox to the left of the file. As previously mentioned, the CCE uses an alternate selection process to enable the display of files containing a particular credit item.

From the context menu you can quickly select or deselect all files. You can also select or deselect all files which are currently highlighted. If you highlight a credit in the Track Credits panel, you can select or highlight the files containing the credit.

You can also highlight all Track Credits in or not in a single file from the context menu.

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## The Known Credits Panel

The Known Credits panel describes built in and user defined credits. There are an awful lot of them. More than 7000 unique credits are built in. Good news, you can filter and search. Alphabetic case is ignored in credit names and cannot be used to differentiate items.

The Status column contains indicators describing various aspects of the credit. If you forget what each indicator means a tooltip is available by hovering over the column's header. The following indicators may be present:

> D
>   The credit is a known Discogs credit.
> B
>   The credit is a known MusicBrainz credit.
> R
>   The credit is a known Roon credit.
> U
>   The credit is user defined.
> I
>   The credit has a default mapping to the Involved People field.
> M
>   The credit has a default mapping to the Musician Credits field.
> S
>   The credit has a specified mapping of Composer, Conductor, Lyricist or Remixer. These mappings are only used by the Discogs Wizard to pull these values. In the CCE, the mapping is treated as Involved People. Unless you make changes only certain known Discogs credits will have these mappings. Simple fields are always associated with a specific mapping and do not interact with the Known Credits Panel.
> H
>   With well over 7000 known credits it is entirely likely that there are some you have no interest in. A credit can be assigned the Hidden attribute which can then be used in a filter.
> *
>   A built in credit's mapping or alias field has been changed.

If you click on the filter icon a Known Credits Filter palette will be displayed. For each of the above indicators there is an associated item which can be used to filter the credits that are displayed. Each item has three possible values:

> -
>   The specified status has no effect on the display of the credit. This is the cleared state for all of the filters.
> ✕
>   In order to be displayed, a credit must not exhibit the associated status. If it does, it will be hidden.
> ✓
>   In order to be displayed, a credit must exhibit the associated status. ie. If it does not, it will be hidden.

The indicator column headers are buttons which when selected, set all the items to the displayed value.

All of the filter items have their states retained. Whatever you set, will still be set the next time the CCE is run.

You can also filter on text. If you enter text in the Filter text field and hit Enter, all items which do not contain the specified text will be hidden. If you enter 'guitar', only those credits containing guitar will be displayed. The search text is case insensitive.

If you want to quickly remove all status filters and the text filter, you can do so from the table's context menu by selecting: Show All Items.

If you wish to manually add a new known credit, three fields are used. Do the following:

- Enter the name of the new credit in the credit name field immediately under the search field.
- Choose a mapping. Note that while you can choose any mapping, remember that any mapping other than Involved People or Musician Credits is treated as Involved People by the CCE. You are only given the choice in the case that Discogs adds new known credits that we have not implemented.
- You can choose to enter an alias. Some CCE functions have the ability to remap credits to their specified alias. The context menu for the Credit and Alias of fields supports Yate Transformations.
- When the displayed information is to your liking, hit the + button.

The Known Credits table has the following items on its context menu:

> Set Hidden Attribute
>   All selected items will have their hidden attribute set.
> Clear Hidden Attribute
>   All selected items will have their hidden attribute cleared.
> Copy Credit to Clipboard
>   The credit on the clicked row will be copied to the clipboard.
> Copy Alias to Clipboard
>   The alias on the clicked row will be copied to the clipboard.
> Paste Clipboard as Alias
>   All selected items will have their Alias Of field set to the contents of the clipboard.
> Apply Selected Credit to Track Credits
>   The Credit of the single selected item will be applied as the credit of all selected Track Credits.
> Apply Selected Alias to Track Credits
>   The non empty Alias Of of the single selected item will be applied as the credit of all selected Track Credits.
> Delete
>   All selected user defined credits, those with a U status indicator, will be deleted. Note that the Delete key can also be used.
> Reset to Default Values
>   All selected non user defined credits, those without a U status indicator, will be reset to their default values. Note that the hidden attribute is not modified.
> Show All Items
>   All status filters will be reset and the text filter will be removed.
> Hide All Items
>   All status filters will be set to the Off (✕) state. This make be quicker than manually clearing all but one filter.
> Validate Known Credits Table...
>   The table is analysed to look for potential issues. These issues typically revolve around alias definitions. If any issues are found they are displayed in the Log Viewer.

The lock control affects what happens when a single known credit is selected. When unlocked, the selected items's name, mapping and alias will be copied to the appropriate fields below the table. When locked, nothing is copied. When you set the control to unlock and exactly one known credit is selected, its information is copied.

If you want to apply the displayed Credit as an alias of all selected known credits, click on the ⬆︎︎ button to the right of the field.

If you want to apply the displayed Alias as an alias of all selected known credits, click on the ⬆︎︎ button to the right of the field.

If you want to apply the displayed mapping as the mapping of all selected known credits, click on the ⬆︎︎ button to the right of the control.

The ➘︎ button to the right of the Credit field will copy the credit name to the Credit field in the Track Credits panel.

The ➔ button to the right of the Alias field will copy the alias name to the Credit field in the Track Credits panel.

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## The Track Credits Panel

This panel describes the credits extracted from the files that were selected when the CCE was opened.

The first column contains an image describing if the credit is in all files (solid circle) or not in all files (half filled circle). The Status column may contain the following indicators:

> I
>   The credit is mapped to the Involved People field.
> M
>   The credit is mapped to the Musician Credits field.
> S
>   The credit is mapped to the simple field.
> R
>   The credit is a known Roon credit.
> K
>   The credit is a known, non Roon, credit.
> ~
>   The credit is only matched if its [qualifier] is removed. Note that Q will always be indicated.
> ?
>   The credit is not known. ie. it does not appear in the Known Credits table.
> *
>   The credit is not standard. ie. ie. the credit is in Involved People but known as associated with Musician Credits, or vice versa.
> Q
>   The credit has a qualifier. ie. it has a sequence of text enclosed in square brackets. Discogs can qualify one of its pre-defined roles with user supplied text. When matching items in the Known Credits table, an attempt is first made to match the role with the qualifier. If that does not succeed an attempt is made to match the role with the qualifier removed. When adding to the Known Credits table, qualifiers are not removed. This allows you to create known credits which represent Discogs roles with qualifiers. Roon will not match any credits with a qualifier on it.
> A
>   The credit matches a known credit which has an alias field.

The Person and Credit columns can be dragged to flip their display position. You can sort on all four columns.

If you click on the filter icon a Track Credits Filter palette will be displayed. This pallet operates exactly the same as the Known Credits Palette. Note that in addition to the status based filter items, there is an In selected files filter item. This item looks for inclusion in or exclusion from the current set of selected files. Using this filter you can isolate which credits are in or not in the current set of selected files.

All of the filter items have their states retained. Whatever you set, will still be set the next time the CCE is run.

To add a new credit, do the following:

> - Select the files in the Files panel (checkboxes), that you wish the credit to appear in.
> - Enter a name in the Person field. The name should represent one artist's name unless the name is a multiple person single entity such as Daryl Hall & John Oates. Avoid using commas in names as that will mess things up. The Involved People and Musician Credits fields in ID3 based files use commas as a fixed delimiter.
> - If you are creating an Involved People or Musician Credits item, enter a credit name. You can copy the information in the Known Credits Credit field by clicking on the down arrow button in that panel. While the Credit field can be left empty, it is not recommended. If you are creating a simple field item, the credit field is ignored as it is implied by the simple field being assigned.
> - Select a field mapping. Note that the popup list will only display Custom Fields if they have been designated as credits.
> - When the displayed information is to your liking, hit the + button.

You can add multiple credits to one or more people by separating items in the Person and/or Credits fields with commas. (Remember that the Credits field is ignored when adding simple credits). Only the displayed mapping will be applied. If you are copying and pasting credits, it may be easier to add them this way and to go back after and correct any incorrect mapping. This is the only function which supports multiple people and credits and is the only function where the automatic replacement of commas with the alternate comma character does not occur..

If you want to add a credit where the person or credit name contains commas, prefix the Person or Credit field with a backslash (\). Commas in these fields will be substituted and the field will be treated as a single entity. eg. If Person contains Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young and Credit contains Vocals, adding will produce three Vocals credits. One for Crosby, one for Stills and one for Nash & Young. If Person contains \Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young only one credit will be added.

The Person, Credit and Mapping values can easily be applied to any items in the Track Credits table by selecting the desired items and by clicking on the ⬆︎︎ button to the right of the appropriate control. The Credit field will not be applied to simple fields.

The Track Credits table has the following items on its context menu. Note that unless otherwise mentioned, the associated functions operate on all selected items in the Track Credits table.

> Apply to All Files
>   Items will be applied to all files (selected or not).
> Apply to Selected Files
>   Items will be applied to all selected (checked) files. The function is additive. ie. if non selected files contained an applied credit, it will not be removed.
> Apply Only to Selected Files
>   Items will be applied to all selected (checked) files. the function is exclusive. ie. if non selected files contained an applied credit, it will be removed.
> Apply to Highlighted Files
>   Items will be applied to all highlighted files. The function is additive. ie. if non highlighted files contained an applied credit, it will not be removed.
> Apply Only to Highlighted Files
>   Items will be applied to all highlighted files. the function is exclusive. ie. if non highlighted files contained an applied credit, it will be removed.
> Remove from All Files
>   Delete the selected items. Note that the Delete key can also be used for this function.
> Remove from Selected Files
>   The selected items will be removed from all selected files.
> Remove from Highlighted Files
>   The selected items will be removed from all highlighted files.
> Select Only Files Containing Items
>   Files containing the clicked item will be selected (checked).
> Select Only Files Containing Item
>   Only files containing the clicked item will be selected (checked).
> Highlight Files Containing Item
>   Only files containing the clicked item will be highlighted.
> Auto Highlight Files
>   This item is a setting and displays its on state as a checkmark to the left of the item. When enabled and you select a single credit, files containing the credit will automatically be highlighted.
> Remove Qualifiers
>   Any text in a credit after and including a [ character will be removed. Note that credits and aliases in the CCE are always trimmed. ie. leading and trailing spaces are removed.
> Remove Items With No Credit
>   Items with an empty credit field will be removed. This function ignores simple credits.
> Resolve Aliases
>   If an item matches a known credit which has an alias, the alias will be substituted for the credit name. This function ignores simple credits.
> Resolve Non Standard Mappings
>   If an item matches a known credit but has a mapping other than the mapping associated with the known credit, the known credit's mapping will be applied. This function treats any known credit mapping other than Musician Credits is treated as Involved People. This function ignores simple credits.
> Resolve Non Standard Simple Mappings
>   If an item matches a known credit associated with a simple item (Composer, Conductor, Lyricist, Remixer, Album Artist, Artist, Original Artist or Original Lyricist), the known credit's mapping will be applied.
> Resolve Empty Credits
>   This is a quick means of resolving all credits that are empty. An empty credit in Involved People will be changed to Administration. An empty credit in Musician Creditss will be changed to Performer.
> Show Duplicate Items
>   An item is a duplicate if it has the same person and credit mapped to both Involved People and Musician Credits. This function operates on all items in the Track Credits table, hidden or not. This filter persists until removed. Note that duplicate items in simple fields are automatically removed when the CCE opens.
> Merge Duplicates Items Into ...
>   Selected duplicates will be merged into either Involved People or Musician Credits.
> Show Items Not Valid For Roon
>   Any item which cannot be matched to a known credit will be displayed. This function operates on all items in the Track Credits table, hidden or not. This filter persists until removed. This function ignores simple credits.
> Apply Alphabetic Case ...
>   These functions provide a means of normalizing the alphabetic case of people and credits. They operate on all items in the table, displayed or not.
>   Of Displayed Person
>     Any item with the same person as the displayed Person field will have the same alphabetic case set.
>   Of Displayed Credit
>     Any item with the same credit as the displayed Credit field will have the same alphabetic case set. This function ignores simple credits.
>   Of All Known People
>     Any item with the same person as a name in the Artists List, will have the same alphabetic case set.
>   Of All Known Credits
>     Any item with the same credit as a Known Credit will have the same alphabetic case set. This function ignores simple credits.
> Save Credits
>   Any item with a credit which is not known will be added to the Known Credits Table. This function ignores simple credits.
> Save Credits With Alias
>   A single item must be selected in the Known Credits Table. Any item with a credit which is not known will be added to the Known Credits Table as an alias to the item selected in the Known Credits table. This function ignores simple credits.
> Save Credits With Alias and Resolve
>   A single item must be selected in the Known Credits Table. Any item with a credit which is not known will be added to the Known Credits Table as an alias to the item selected in the Known Credits table. The Credits associated with each item will be changed to the alias. eg. For some reason you are importing credits named Gitar. If you select Guitar in the Known Credits table applying this function will create a Known Credit named Gitar as an alias of Guitar. All selected Track Credit table items with a credit of Gitar will be changed to Guitar This function ignores simple credits..
> Show All Items
>   All filter controls will be set to the - state.
> Hide All Items
>   All filter controls will be set to the Off state. This make be quicker than manually clearing all but one filter.

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