See pic below for what is a tooltip, and what is track info. Regarding the 4 options in settings under Tree & View:
- YES will show both Tooltips and the Track Info popup when hovering over selected items
- NO will exclude either of these from ever popping up.
- The Everything but Track Info nomenclature is an odd choice, but all it really means is it that only tooltips will be shown, and not the track info popup
- That leaves Only Track Info which by process of elimination, is the option to only show the track info popup.
This specific control over what is displayed was implemented around a year ago to satisfy a request from a user who really disliked the track info popup. That said, there are several issues that need to be addressed for this to be a more useful.
- the tooltips toolbar icon needs to include a drop-down menu with a checkmark by the current selection - cycling through four options blindly is not very useful.
- having an icon menu will make it much easier to switch among the options and know exactly what the outcome will be
- Tooltip popups in every program I've used shows a brief description for the specific function of a button (like the radio button in the screenshot), or over the play/previous/next buttons in the player bar
- With the exception of the track info however, MC treats everything elseas a tooltip, even if it is not really a "tooltip"
To improve this functionality, there needs to be a 3rd category of "pop-ups" for things like the artist bio popup when hovering over that tag in the tag window, or to display the full track title when it is cut off by the column width - these items are most definitely not "tooltips". After all, things like biography and lyrics ARE explicitly "track related info", so why MC groups these with tooltip popups (and thus get turned off along with tooltips) makes no sense to me.
But others may prefer to only see the track info popup, but never the artist bio, lyrics, notes, etc. popup (or the other way around) - thus a 3rd option. It could possibly be called "text expansion pop-up". Either way, This additional "popup" category is highly necessary IMO. Even lightly experienced MC users have zero need for actual "tooltips" (everyone knows triangle = play, square = stop, etc). I would very much appreciate an option to turn off "actual" tooltips only, and leave all the other popups active, but that is not currently possible.
Crossing my fingers Matt reads this thread and incorporates the suggestions above.