These three features are important, yet they have never received any comment from devs. This despite the fact that they have received support from other customers, in fact, over time, the first one has been requested by 15-20 people.
The level of functionality delivered by these changes - per developer hour - is far higher than most of the flashy features being discussed.
I gather that they are low priority because they would not be able to be marketed to new customers. So, I thought that they would make good incentives for existing customers to upgrade to MC22. They are:
1) Sidecar files for audio, especially SACD .ISO files and .CUE files.
When a user enters additional tag information for audio files, they can write all the tag data to FLAC, APE and MP3 files. But .CUE files and SACD .ISO files cannot be written to. While it is true that the Library is regularly backed up, nevertheless there are situations where it is helpful to re-import some files. Without sidecar audio files, the tag data has to be retyped by hand any time those files are reimported. This feature has been requested many times by many users.
2) Failure logging for television
When a scheduled program fails to record, every other DVR, whether hardware or software, logs the event, including a reason for failure (no signal, insufficient disk space, no available tuner, etc.). One free software TV recording program even includes a small notification program that sits in the tray of any Windows PC and communicates by network to the TV recording software, indicating red for recording, and tooltips with what is recording, and access to logs, etc.
In contrast, MC21 does not even log the reason for failure.
3) Failure logging for importing
In MC21, when new files are imported, an informative dialog is made available, but once dismissed, the information is lost forever. It would be helpful to simply write the exact same text to a permanent log file. Even better would be to give reasons for files failing to import.
Both logs files should be entirely separate from debugging logs, because they are part of normal operation.
Thanks for your time and attention to these requests.