Excited to see (now that I’ve tagged over 7,000 files manually LOL) that there are now custom list dropdowns. How do I populate those lists quickly from the hundreds of different Composers, Lyricists, Conductors, etc., that I’ve already normalized? Is it all fields or only certain ones?
You can have a look here, including Import/Export to populate your Custom List Values:
The techincal aspects aside: I wonder how many names you really have that participated in a noticeable amount of pieces.
As the function does not add data to existing data but sets the entry as absolute item, it is not possible to create a list of performers - which means that you need any combination as separate entry which will create such a long list, that I doubt the amount of offered entries will really ease the work.
E.g. looking at a folder with samplers and 28,000 files, the list of (unique) artist names adds up to some 14,000 artist names - which means that only very few names appear more than twice, most of them probably only once.
If there are performers with difficult spelling then I think sorting by name and the use of the tag panel is much easier than to maintain a longish list of custom entries.
But as the use cases vary, I speak only for myself.
To get a list of e.g. composers, load all the files, create an export script with the expression
$loop(%composer%,1)%composer%$loopend()
and let it output a text file.
Then you can use the resulting list as input for the custom lists for fields.