Matt,
Thanks for the suggestion but it wouldn't work.
Here's why:
When I say I'm tagging all my files - I dont mean I'm going through them one by one tagging them. I'm sitting at work, I do this as a search:
rating=[] then send all the files that have no rating to 'playing now'
I'm not sure if u saw the discussion a while ago where we talked about how to make a task bar control set - well I made one that has all the playing controls plus 6 buttons - 0,1,2,3,4,5 - I play my music while I work and as each song comes on, I just click on the rating button to rate it - VERY easy and intuitive and lets me rate while I work.
Now for some songs though I really want to start tagging them with a 'mood' field too which will be a list type.
I plan to sort them by things like: mellow, party, dance routine, romantic, hyper, angry, etc.
Some of the songs will be in multiple moods - a party one might also be really good for dance routines etc.
I'm just going to let all the songs play and as I listen to them I'm going to quickly tag them.
I dont have the time to sit down and actually dedicate the time and effort to a pure tagging task for 10,000 songs.
It's just something I need to be able to do quicly while I listen to the songs - push the button on that toolbar I made to maximise MC, click on the items in the mood it should be in and rate it, minimise it and get back to work - it should take no more than 5-10 seconds per song as they come on.
That's the key to a good jukebox - where we have to dedicate as little time as possible to managing our files and get to spend the majority of it just listening to our songs and the organisation happens automatically.
That's why WMP's feature of working out songs we like at night, during the day etc is a good one - it works out what we like etc without us having to do any work.
Split screen really allows us to easily add songs to playing now, playlists etc really easily just by dragging and dropping and is a feature that would be alot of power - not sure how long it'd take to mock up - but how about doing something like u did when u first introduced the panes - do a seperate .exe with the change and let a few brave souls test it out and see how it works?
Oh yeah - and just as an idea - the taskbar controls have revelotionised how easy it is for me to use/control etc MC and combined with the rating buttons to rate songs as I listen to them works sooo intuitively.
I'm pretty sure it'd be pretty easy for u guys to make the installer automatically create a toolbar on the task bar - its pretty basic stuff - I think it'd give MC a REALLY big selling point and copy WMP9's feature of docking to the system tray. All each button does is call: mjextman.exe /theCommandAsDefinedInGirder
I remember a lot of people begging for WMP9 like functionality.
It works so well because the problelm with mini-me is it always covers something in order to stay on screen - task bar controls dont and are still always visible.