CSV list of Albums in Music Library?

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In music looking at a Playlist (or whole library) I see how you can “Select All-Copy” and then paste into Numbers and it gives you a spreadsheet of your the Playlist song-by-song.

But, I’m looking to make a list of just artists and albums.

Maybe a CSV (Numbers) rule to select and remove duplicates in the Albums column would get me there?

Thanks.

2

You could use a Pivot table for this:

  • Copy the data into the sheet
  • Create a pivot table from the Organise menu.
  • In the Pivot options sidebar, from the “Fields” area, drag the column for artist down to the “rows” area.
  • Drag the column for Album name into the “rows” area.
  • You’ll probably want to click (i) symbol against the column for Artists in the “rows” area and uncheck the option for “show row totals” - unless of course that’s desirable info.

And you should end up with something that looks like this:

Screenshot 2022-08-14 at 11.17.26
Screenshot 2022-08-14 at 11.17.261920×1223 133 KB

I’m not sure how well this will work for Compilation albums with multiple artists - that might throw things into chaos - though potentially you could reverse the selection of Artist & Album so you’re grouping my album name first.

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3

Once again, pivot tables FTW!

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Been looking for an excuse to play with pivot tables for a while. For years I’d heard the term but wasn’t sure what they were. By the time I found out what they were I no longer had the problem they’d have solved for me. ho-humm. Funny old world.

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Thanks for your suggestions.
I’m not an Excel users so the Pivot Tables option is not an option for me.
I did however find a duplicates sorting option here: https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/how-to-find-remove-duplicates-in-numbers-mac/

Using the basic duplicate finding formula: *IF(B2)=(B1),“Duplicate”,"Keep "
Where B is the column contains the album titles, and pull down the formula to the remaining table. and for obvious reasons this does not work for Compilations.

My test sample sorted well, though admittedly, I’m still learning about formulas and I got lost on the merge data step.

Still open to other solutions.

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Numbers does Pivot Tables too:

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7

It appears you could do this with AppleScript, if you’re into self-flagellation.

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The example I posted was done in numbers, I haven’t got Excel on this machine either! :smiley:

To be fair, I think Pivot tables in Apple Numbers is a relatively recent addition - I think it was only last year that it got added.

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Ah, I was wondering about that. Now if only you could put a file url in a cell…

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