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Author Topic: Does anybody use "tagging mode" -- and why?  (Read 1741 times)

lalittle

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Does anybody use "tagging mode" -- and why?
« on: February 24, 2004, 04:49:42 am »

I find the "tagging mode" a bit of a mystery.  If I want to change tag information I either use "tag info" in the AW or I just edit in the right hand windows.  In what circumstances do people actually use "tagging mode"?  I've never seen the need for it, and it has actually caused problems for me in the past when someone got into it without knowing what they were doing.

Since "tagging mode" only offers 3 possible tag items, I don't see it's point, and since it has the potential to actually cause problems with inexperienced users, it seems like it creates more harm than good.  People from JRiver are often posting about making the program less confusing to new users.  In my opinion, all the little boxes that appear and disappear as you work are potentially one of the most confusing things about this program.

If it's goint to remain, would it be possible to at least have the option of COMPLETELY disabling it, along with the array of boxes that it utilizes?

Thanks,

Larry
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Deivit

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Re:Does anybody use "tagging mode" -- and why?
« Reply #1 on: February 24, 2004, 05:37:01 am »

I use tagging mode extensively for tagging batches of music newly imported into MC. I do not use MC for images but I think that tagging mode is very useful for that purpose too.

Normally, my recently imported files have the Artist, Name and Album already filled but I have to fill te other tags. I have set a specific view scheme to be used in tagging mode that works great for me. The upper view has the following panes:

1.- Genre
2.- Album Artist (Auto)
3.- Year
4.- Rating

and the lower view is set to album thumbnails, sorted by artist.

You can use as many panes (or fields) as you want.

This is the procedure I follow:

1.- I select the first album thumbnail and/or all the thumbnails belonging to the same artist.
2.- I apply the genre to them all by checking the relative box in the first column of the pane.
3.- If applicable, I check the box of the Album Artist (Auto) relating to that specific album.
4.- I select now the first thumbnail of the artist and check the relative box of the year.

I repeat then the same procedure with the rest of the thumbnails.

Once the last album has been tagged, I select the whole lot and apply Rating 3 checking the relative check-box in the fourth pane to all of them (this is my default rating and would probably require a deeper explanation as to why I do that... but that's a different story).

I found that, when you have a lot of albums to tag, it is faster using tagging mode and selecting the appropiate check-boxes rather than scrolling into each of the fields in the AW.

This is how I do it. Obviously it can be done differently.

I could afford losing "tagging mode"... but I find it very comfortable when tagging a large number of files.

Thank you.



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lalittle

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Re:Does anybody use "tagging mode" -- and why?
« Reply #2 on: February 24, 2004, 06:23:58 am »

That makes sense.

I guess my workflow just isn't the same.  All my imports are ripped from CDs which are tagged before the sync, so all my tagging is easily done in the AW.

It would still make more sense to me if the boxes didn't appear unless you entered tagging mode.  At least this would prevent people from accidentally getting into it.

Larry
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Deivit

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Re:Does anybody use "tagging mode" -- and why?
« Reply #3 on: February 24, 2004, 07:34:21 am »

Well, at least in the version of MC.10 that I'm using, "Tagging Mode" is disabled by default.

When you click on any of the checkboxes with tagging mode disabled, a message pops-up stating that you need to enable tagging mode and giving you the opportunity to enable it at that moment of simply exit.
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LonWar

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Re:Does anybody use "tagging mode" -- and why?
« Reply #4 on: February 24, 2004, 07:39:31 am »

Personally I have no use for it.... All the music I have is from the cd's I own, So when I rip a CD I have all the info.

I can't even remember how to use tagging mode...
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_K_C_

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Re:Does anybody use "tagging mode" -- and why?
« Reply #5 on: February 24, 2004, 11:10:12 am »

If you just use Genre/Artist/Album for music then it's easier to get the tags right before you rip.  For more complicated tagging, then the tagging mode is excellent.

eg.
I've created a Custom semi-colon delimited Field called "Genres" so that I can assign more than one genre to a track / album (useful for sub-genres and for albums that could be classified under more than one main genre).  Tagging mode is much quicker than doing this manually.

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skidoo

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Re:Does anybody use "tagging mode" -- and why?
« Reply #6 on: February 24, 2004, 12:45:42 pm »

I still don't get it. Y'all realize you can select multiple files in the right-side list, use the AW's "Tag Info" window, right? That is, when multiple songs are selected, you can replace the value in a particular field across all of the selected songs.

Matt

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Re:Does anybody use "tagging mode" -- and why?
« Reply #7 on: February 24, 2004, 01:12:14 pm »

Quote
I still don't get it. Y'all realize you can select multiple files in the right-side list, use the AW's "Tag Info" window, right? That is, when multiple songs are selected, you can replace the value in a particular field across all of the selected songs.

That requires more typing.

Tagging mode allows one-click tag changes.
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Matt Ashland, JRiver Media Center

skidoo

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Re:Does anybody use "tagging mode" -- and why?
« Reply #8 on: February 24, 2004, 04:25:34 pm »

Quote
I still don't get it. Y'all realize you can select multiple files in the right-side list, use the AW's "Tag Info" window, right? That is, when multiple songs are selected, you can replace the value in a particular field across all of the selected songs.

That requires more typing.

Tagging mode allows one-click tag changes.

Hmm. Are you refering to the dropdown lists? The Tag Info window has these too. How else can you do "one-click tag changes?"

lalittle

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Re:Does anybody use "tagging mode" -- and why?
« Reply #9 on: February 24, 2004, 04:46:21 pm »

Quote
Hmm. Are you refering to the dropdown lists? The Tag Info window has these too. How else can you do "one-click tag changes?"

Technically, that takes more than one click (one to open the drop down, one to select) along with some scrolling.   Like you, however, I much prefer the AW Tag Info screen for tagging since it has ALL the tags in one convenient spot and doesn't require restructuring the main display to get the panes you need.  The "one click" tagging that they're referring to is the row of check boxes that literally takes a single click to select/deselect.

I still wish it could be completely disabled (i.e. no "boxes.")

Larry
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Sam

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Re:Does anybody use "tagging mode" -- and why?
« Reply #10 on: February 24, 2004, 04:50:26 pm »

Quote
I still don't get it. Y'all realize you can select multiple files in the right-side list, use the AW's "Tag Info" window, right? That is, when multiple songs are selected, you can replace the value in a particular field across all of the selected songs.

That requires more typing.

Tagging mode allows one-click tag changes.

Hmm. Are you refering to the dropdown lists? The Tag Info window has these too. How else can you do "one-click tag changes?"

the check-boxes in the panes
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Rob L

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Re:Does anybody use "tagging mode" -- and why?
« Reply #11 on: February 24, 2004, 05:00:42 pm »

I certainly don't find tagging mode at all intuitive, but maybe it takes a certain mindset to get it :-)

Or maybe it's just down to having a very different way of using MC and MP3s, etc. than I have....
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Jaguu

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Re:Does anybody use "tagging mode" -- and why?
« Reply #12 on: February 24, 2004, 05:30:41 pm »

I have more than a dozen user defined fields for my classical music, my artworks and image collections (about 10'000 images). I have user defined fields such as composer, conductor, orchestra, soloists, movement for classical music, period, paintstyle, paintyear, paintsize, gallery for artworks, continent and country for images. A lot of image tagging was done during the 9.1 beta phase and it was really a big improvement. It became so easy and quick to tag images.

Since then I did only little tag work, but from the limited use I did, I got the impression that tagging mode was better organised at the end of the 9.1 development cycle, although they introduced auto-complete in 10.0.  But I often found myself to click twice the same tag before MC10 accepted my choice. Sometimes you selected a tag, than the whole thing was reset and I had to tag again. As I did not have time to investigate in more detail, I cannot say whether it was buggy or not. Maybe it has improved since then.

In any case the combination of panes and tagging mode is a great winner for MC.

What they probably need to do is a security flag that does not allow to make tag changes by anyone at party time.



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