INTERACT FORUM

Please login or register.

Login with username, password and session length
Advanced search  
Pages: [1]   Go Down

Author Topic: Album database table on the wishlist  (Read 1576 times)

Tanguero

  • Regular Member
  • World Citizen
  • ***
  • Posts: 115
Album database table on the wishlist
« on: December 05, 2004, 05:41:55 pm »

I guess  this comes far too late for MC 11, but I want to mention it anyway as an idea for future development:

Today, "Album" seems to be only a property of the track, stored as a text field in the MP3 tag (or whatever format the track is in). It also seems that the database in MC only has one table, and this table contains information for the individual tracks.

I would like an album table in the database, where albums are treated as objects with properties. Interesting properties could be:
-Record company
-Disc number
-A free text field
-Date of purchase
-Place of purchase
(the two last are perhaps less important)

Other interesting information is of course
-Album title
-Album artist
but these field are already stored in the track tags.

Then why do I want this?

Firstly it would make MC a nice tool to get an overview of my CD collection.

Secondly, I want to share information about my CD collection with my friends. If I had an album table that could be exported to external formats (tab delimited, XML or whatever), this would be far eaiser.

If i find a music player offering this, I might consider abandoning MC in spite of the time I have spent on putting information in the customised tags.

If  on the  other hand JRiver offered this possiblity, it could be a real "sticky function"  making  customers quite reluctant to leave MC.


Logged

JONCAT

  • Guest
Re: Album database table on the wishlist
« Reply #1 on: February 02, 2005, 05:50:04 pm »

This could be handy. Albums are rleased in different years, remastered, different labels.

XML plugin work for you?

JC
Logged

Alex B

  • MC Beta Team
  • Citizen of the Universe
  • *****
  • Posts: 10121
  • The Cosmic Bird
Re: Album database table on the wishlist
« Reply #2 on: February 02, 2005, 07:11:04 pm »

Many of those things can be achieved by adding user defined fields and view schemes or smartlists, but that will increase the amount of additional data numerous times because the same information is repeated for every track.

I would like to add an entry for album images playlist. I like to use several cover art images (front, back, booklet, CD, etc) and play them on a slideshow. MC could start it automatically if a music album could be linked to an images playlist.

On the other hand, with the current database system a simple "Play all image files from the file folder in a slideshow when the playback of a music file is started" option would do as well.
Logged
The Cosmic Bird - a triple merger of galaxies: http://eso.org/public/news/eso0755

dcwebman

  • Citizen of the Universe
  • *****
  • Posts: 2154
Re: Album database table on the wishlist
« Reply #3 on: February 03, 2005, 07:30:52 am »

I use CatTraxx to catalog all my CD's with out ripping them all and am still trying to find the best way to do that in MC so I can get rid of CatTraxx. It seems the only way I can do this is by inserting the CD's and then seeing them viewed under CD & DVD under the Advanced section. Is that the only way?

On a similar point, I only plan on using MC for audio so I keep it in Audio Only mode. Doing this loses the Advanced section except for the hard disk location. You would think that the Advanced options would still be applicable for audio only.
Jeff
Logged
Jeff

Tanguero

  • Regular Member
  • World Citizen
  • ***
  • Posts: 115
Re: Album database table on the wishlist
« Reply #4 on: February 06, 2005, 05:40:37 pm »

This could be handy. Albums are rleased in different years, remastered, different labels.

XML plugin work for you?

JC
Hi JONCAT,

I tried it, but I can't say it worked well.  It did really produce a 10MB XML file, but when I tried to open it using Netscape and Firefox, it consumed absurd amounts of memory (>300 MB in Firefox) without any visible result. My PC was quite reluctant to terminate the browsers too; I had to go to the process in the activity managers, not the programs. In IE i got a warning messsage about active content. Here, the memory usage for IE was just below 300 MB. The warning recommend me not to go on unless I trust the source of the webpage.

Having no personal mistrust against the designer, I still feelthat the plugin is not something I want to run any more on my computer.

I just saw though that this plugin is discussed on http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=25923.0.

/Tanguero
Logged
Pages: [1]   Go Up