Mixer 1.9 Preview: New Power Words
In this preview, I’m going to discuss some of the new data which the 1.9 mixer makes available, and show a few of the ways to use it. For this post, I’ll focus on some new keywords which have been added to the mixer vocabulary.
Reviewing Expressions
As a basic review, the mixer lets you use expressions in a variety of contexts, which can provide powerful tools for working with your music collection. These expressions can include references to basic metadata already in your file, like artist, title, or path. If you enable Power Search from the preferences dialog, you can enter an expression into the search bar with a preceding question mark, to do a power search, like this:
?seconds > 180
This will show all songs over 3 minutes.
Another context for expressions is adding columns to the song view in order to show data which otherwise might not be visible. For example, you might want to show how many channels your audio files have (1 for mono, or 2 for stereo). Normally this is not exposed in the user interface, but you can add it with the new channels keyword. To do this, simply edit the powerwords.txt file in your installation directory (copy examplewords.txt to powerwords.txt if you don’t already have one), and add a Power Column, like this:
[Channels] channels
The word inside brackets is the title which will show up in the song list, and the rest of the line is any expression (in this case, a single word, but it could just as well be bytes / seconds or any other expression). If you want the column to sort numerically, place a # symbol after the closing bracket. If you want to format a number as a date, place an @ symbol after the closing bracket.
For completeness, you can also use expressions inside patterns. In this case, just use the %{ } syntax, like this:
%{seconds}
This lets you access any available data when updating metadata or constructing paths.
New Keywords
Now that we’ve seen how powerful expressions can be, what new options are exposed in version 1.9? We’ve already seen the channels keyword above. Four more new words are missingname, missingartist, missingalbum, and missinggenre. Normally, if your files are missing metadata for artist, album, genre, or title, then the mixer provides a default value like “Miscellaneous” or “Various Artists”. If you want to find out whether a file is actually missing the metadata, or if it simply had one of those default values, you can use the associated keyword to find the relevant songs.
The most useful new keywords come from an improved connection between the mixer and MusicDNS. The central database behind MusicDNS has grown to over a billion rows of anonymous data, which gives us a lot of information about what music is popular, where it’s popular, and how it’s tagged. Additionally, as the data in MusicDNS is connected to MusicBrainz, we have access to richer metadata about artists. Version 1.9 includes the following new keywords (these are case insensitive):
| Keyword | Meaning |
| artistDNSgenre genreDNSgenre songDNSgenre |
This represents the MusicDNS genre attached to the artist, genre, or song. These provide high level, simple genres which can be used to organize your music. |
| artistBegin artistEnd |
These are the first and last years during which an artist released new tracks (if known). |
| songBegin | This is the first year the track was released (if known). |
| artistReach | This is a numeric representation of how popular an artist is, according to MusicDNS. Zero is the least popular, and one is the most popular. |
| songReach songRelativeReach |
This is a numeric representation of how popular a song is, according to MusicDNS. Zero is the least popular, and one is the most popular. Relative reach is the same scale, but refers to how popular a song is relative to other songs by that artist (the most popular song by an artist will always have a relative reach of 1). |
Note that the above data depends on MusicDNS being able to identify your music, and connect it to our main database.
One quick example will show just how cool this feature can be. In this case, I have a library with two songs by “Nancy Wilson”. However there are two Nancy Wilsons - one is the jazz singer, and the other is a member of the rock band Heart. I’ll create a Power Column using artistBegin, like this:
[Artist Begin]# artistBegin
Now, in my songs list, I get the following image:
The extremely cool feature here, is that the mixer knows that the two songs are by different Nancy Wilsons, and provides the correct date in each case!
Final Words
You can also use expressions to power constraints and modifiers, which let you make your own rules for customizing playlists. Tomorrow we’ll continue our exploration of the new data available in the mixer by looking at the upgraded features available with recipes.