Add, Edit, Merge List Items

With every album you add to your collection, Music Collector stores common information in Lists. These lists come in most handy when add, or edit new albums.

All common information, such as Year, Genre, Format, Location, Owner, etc., is stored in Lists that you can easily edit. You can add, edit, delete and merge these List Items. When you do, the results of your changes are immediately visible in the drop down boxes in each Edit Album screen.

Contents

• Adding New Values to your Lists
• Managing your Lists in the “Manage Pick Lists” screen
• Merging List Items
• The Benefits of Pick Lists

Adding New Values to your Lists

There are 2 kinds of List Fields:

• Pick List fields
• Checkbox List fields.

Adding new values to these List fields can be done from the Edit Album Screen.

1. “Pick List” fields (dropdown boxes in Edit Album Screen)

• Open the Edit Album screen.
• Click on a dropdown field to see what you already have in this Pick List field.
• Type in a new value to add it to the Pick List field.
• Then click OK to save the changes and the new value will be added to the Pick List field for future use in any other album.

2. “Checkbox List” fields (lists of checkboxes in Edit Album Screen)

An example for a multi-value Checkbox List field is “Genre”.

For Checkbox List fields, the process is slightly different. These show up in the Edit Album Screen as a list of checkboxes.

• To add a new value: type it in the box that is below the checklist, then click the blue + icon.
• The value will be added, checked, and saved for future use in any other album.

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Managing your Pick Lists

For full control of your pick lists, you can use the Manage Pick Lists screen.

On Windows: Click Edit > Manage Pick Lists to get there and choose the list you wish to work on.
On macOS: Click Tools > Manage Pick Lists to get there and choose the list you wish to work on.

Now you can use the Add Item button (blue “plus” icon) to add your own list items. You can also remove existing entries, edit their names, merge duplicate entries and fix erroneous entries.

You can manage all the program’s “pick lists” here (Formats, Subjects, Studios, Publishers, Platforms, Series, etc…) and of course all people lists (Artists, Authors, Producers, Actors, etc…).

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Merging List Items

If you have “duplicates” in your Pick Lists, you can actually “merge” two list items into one. Select each one of them, then right click and select “Merge to:” and then pick one.

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The Benefits of Pick Lists

• They save you a lot of typing. Once a value has been entered in the list, you can just select it from a list instead of retyping it every time.
• The actual item name is stored in the database only once, so if you fix a typo, it automatically fixes that typo for all albums that use that item name.
• They let you control the correct sorting of person names, by entering their first and last names.
• A correctly maintained pick list ensures that your albums are correctly grouped into folders on the main screen.

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