Recall that all the audio files on your Xclef are stored in a single folder using internal ID numbers. The Xclef presents the files to you in virtual views constructed out of the tag information associated with these files. For reasons of simplicity and familiarity, this is also how Cyclef Explorer presents the contents of your Xclef.

The following are the main Cyclef Explorer folders for navigating and viewing your music library:

• Audio Tracks: A sorted list of all audio tracks in your library.
• Artists: An alphabetized list of all the artists found in your library. Each artist folder contains sub-folders for all the albums by that artist, as well as a permanent folder called "[ All: artistname ]" which contains all tracks by that artist.
• Albums: An alphabetized list of all albums found in your library.
• Genres: An alphabetized list of all the genres found in your library. Each genre folder contains all the library tracks that belong that genre.

All the library folders listed above share the same right-pane view configuration when opened in Cyclef Explorer.

The view is divided into columns, each of which can be sorted by clicking the column header once, and reverse-sorted by clicking the header again. The displayed columns, in order, are:

• Name: The displayed name is synthesized by Cyclef from the tag information. Display format can be customized; see below for how.
• Type: Filetype. MP3 or WAV.
• Size: Filesize in kilobytes.
• Length: Duration of track in minutes and seconds.
• Bitrate: Encoding bitrate of the track.
• Genre: Genre of the track, as listed in the tag information.
• Year: Track release year as found in tag information.
• Comments: Comment field from tag information.

The display format of the "Name" column can be fully customized. Go to the "Xclef" tab in the Configuration dialog. Here you can define a template string that tells Cyclef exactly how you would like it to construct the display name from the available tag information. You simply type out a string of text into which you can embed various "tokens" which will be replaced with the appropriate tag data for each file. The tokens recognized by Cyclef are:

• %A - Artist
• %L - Album
• %N - Track Number
• %T - Track Title
• %C - Codec, or filetype extension (mp3, wma, or wav)
• %Y - Year
• %G - Genre

You can insert whatever other text you want to be part of every trackname. The following is the default format string and an example of the kind of filename it would produce:

%A - %L - %N - %T
Britney Spears - Oops - 02 - Stronger

If your computer is on the slow side, you can improve the display speed in Cyclef by turning off all columns except for "Name", if you don't need to see them. Go to the "Xclef" tab in the Configuration dialog and uncheck the "Show All Columns (slower)" option.

In future releases, we will add the capability to have each tag field broken out into its own column.

If you took our advice in Section 4.4.3, you fixed up all the tags in the music files on your computer before transferring them to your Xclef. That way, once they were transferred, everything would already be in order and easy to find.

Of course, we recognize that sometimes you may need to make adjustments, perhaps because you have tracks on your Xclef already that did not have all of their tag data correct at the time of transfer. To address this need, Cyclef offers the ability to edit the tag information associated with your music library.

There are three main methods of editing tags:

• Properties (Edit Tag) Dialog

  To edit the tag information of a track, right-click on it and select "Properties (Edit Tag)", or use the keyboard shortcut which is ALT-Enter. This opens a dialog allowing you to edit each tag field. Make your changes, then click "OK". To edit the tags of multiple tracks at once, select the tracks you want and right-click and select "Properties (Edit Tag)". When multiple tracks are selected, the tag edit dialog will only allow you to edit the fields for which all the selected tracks already shared the same value. So for example, if you had a set of tracks that had the wrong artist name "REO Spudwagon", you could select them all and edit their tag to fix the artist name to "REO Speedwagon". If you wish to edit one of the non-uniform fields (for which the selected tracks did not share a value), you can do so by clicking the "Enable Editing of Non-Uniform Fields" button.

  

• Drag to Folder

  Some people find this method to be more intuitive. You simply drag the tracks to a new artist, album, or genre folder. For example, suppose you have some tracks which have no assigned genre, and they belong in the "Techno" genre. In the left pane, expand the folder tree until the "Techno" genre folder is visible. Then drag the tracks from the right pane to the "Techno" folder. This will change the genre tag field of the selected tracks to "Techno" without affect any other fields. Note that this only works if "Techno" already exists as a genre on your Xclef. If it did not exist, you would have to use the other method of tag editing described above. This drag and drop folder method also works for the artist and album fields.

• Folder Rename

  A third method is to rename an individual artist, album, or genre. Just right-click on any artist, album, or genre folder and select "Rename". This will change the field for all the tracks that belong to that artist, album, or genre.

Finally, please note that the Xclef is not case-sensitive, but it is case-preserving. What this means is that if you try to change a tag field and the only difference is the capitalization of some of the letters, the change will not stick. You need to change one of the letters entirely, making it a two-step process. For example, to change an artist field from "britney spears" to "Britney Spears", first change it to "Brittany Spears", and then change it again to "Britney Spears".

Cyclef Explorer features a built-in database engine called CyclefSQL that gives you powerful search capabilities for your music library.

To perform a search in Cyclef, open the top-level "Search" folder. Cyclef will popup a dialog. Type in a query and click "Search". The results are then displayed in the Search folder. To run another search, just right-click anywhere in the blank area of the right pane and select "New Advanced Search...".

The query syntax is simple yet powerful. The Advanced Search dialog displays a list of the valid fields on which you can search and a list of valid operators for more complex queries. When writing a query, strings must be single-quoted but numbers should not be. String comparisons are not case-sensitive, and substrings will match when using the equals = operator. Here are some basic examples:

Find all tracks whose artist name contains 'band':
artist='band'

Find all tracks whose album name contains 'greatest hits':
album='greatest hits'

Find all tracks longer than 5 minutes (300 seconds):
length > 300

Find all tracks from 1996:
year=1996

For more sophisticated searches, you can use some of the logical operators. For example:

Find all tracks by artist 'prince' shorter than 3 minutes (190 seconds):
artist='prince' AND length < 190

Find all rock and classical tracks from 1996:
genre='rock' OR genre='classical' AND year=1996

To create a new, empty playlist, right-click on the top-level "Playlists" folder, or open the "Playlists" folder and right-click anywhere in the blank area of the right pane. The select "New Playlist...". Cyclef will ask you to name the playlist. Type a name, then click "OK", and the playlist will be created on the Xclef.

To start a new playlist with some of the tracks in your music library, first select the folders and/or tracks you want from any library view folder. Then right-click on them and select "Add to Playlist" and then "New Playlist..." from the context menu. Type in the name of the new playlist and hit "OK", and Cyclef will create a new playlist by that name and put add the files you selected to it.

You can also create a new playlist by merging two or more existing playlists together. Select the playlists you want to merge, then right-click and select "Merge". This operation creates a new merged playlist but also leaves the original playlists in place.

Finally, recall from Section 4.5 that Cyclef can create playlists automatically while transferring files from your computer to the Xclef.

In Cyclef, you can add new tracks to playlists, sort them, shuffle them, manually reorder individual tracks and remove items from playlists.

There are two ways to add new tracks to a playlist, drag and drop and context menu. To use drag and drop method, first select the desired tracks in the right pane. Then make sure your playlist is visible in the left pane and drag and drop the tracks onto the playlist. Alternatively, right-click on the tracks, choose "Add to Playlist" and then select the destination playlist from the menu.

To sort or shuffle a playlist, right-click on it (or anywhere in the blank area of the right-pane when the playlist is open), and select "Sort" or "Shuffle". The "Sort" option sorts the tracks in the playlist by artist, then album, then track number, then title.

To move individual tracks around in a playlist, select the track, hold down the "Shift" key on your keyboard, and drag the track to its new position. The dragged track will be inserted immediately before the track that is highlighted at the time of the drop.

To remove one or more tracks from a playlist, select them, and then either hit the "Delete" key on your keyboard or right-click, select "Delete", and then select "Remove from Playlist Only". This removes the track from the playlist but does not delete it from the Xclef altogether. To do both in one step, choose the "Remove and Delete Track" menu item instead.

To delete one or more playlists, simply select them and hit the "Delete" key on your keyboard or right-click and select "Delete". Note that this does not delete the tracks in those playlists.

The first item under the top-level "Playlists" is a special folder called "Playlist Index". This folder tells you exactly which playlists, if any, each of your audio tracks belongs to. By sorting on the "Count" or "Playlists" columns, you can also quickly determine which audio tracks have not been added to any playlist.

With its CyclefSQL engine, Cyclef Explorer can generate sophisticated, customizable reports on the contents of your Xclef.

To access the reports feature, click on the "Reports" button in the toolbar and go to the "Content Reports" tab. To generate a report, you basically type an SQL query, select an output format, and then click the "Generate Report" button. Your report will be generated and your web browser will be launched so that you can view it.

If you are not familiar with SQL, it stands for Structured Query Language and is a decades-old standard for specifying database queries that is used in virtually all major databases. The CyclefSQL engine embedded in Cyclef Explorer exposes your Xclef's music library as a database against which you can run standard SQL queries.

We realize that although using SQL might make generating reports very easy for database-geeks :-), many people are not familiar with SQL syntax. While it is beyond the scope of this document to give a full and complete explanation of SQL, we can give you several starter examples which should give you a good idea of how to build queries on your own.

• SELECT * FROM audio
  Displays all attributes for all audio tracks on the Xclef.
  
  
• SELECT DISTINCT artist FROM audio ORDER BY artist
  Displays a list of all artists in alphabetical order.
  
  
• SELECT id FROM audio WHERE comment IS NULL
  Displays the id's of all tracks with a blank tag comment field.
  
  

For total beginners, the query field is pre-filled with a default query that generates a complete tracklist. To get back to this default tracklist at any time, click the "Make Default Tracklist" button at the bottom of the dialog.

If you would like to know how to formulate a specific query you have in mind but can't figure out how by looking at these examples, send us an e-mail and we will try to whip something up. You can also learn more about SQL using the extensive SQL resources available on the web.

The CyclefSQL engine can generate its reports in 4 formats:

• Comma-Separated Text (txt): Columns are separated by commas. Suitable for import into spreadsheet software like Excel or for perl processing.
• Tab-Separated Text (txt): Columns separated by tab characters. Also suitable for Excel or perl.
• HTML Table (html): Data formatted as an HTML table suitable for viewing in a web browser. HTML output uses Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) attributes for formatting, allowing you to customize the look of the output.
• XML Document (xml): Data formatted as XML entities. Suitable for viewing in a web browser or other XML browsing software.