I've been fiddling round with the notes section lately. It's pretty neat.
I know it's only early days, but here's what I'd like to see happen. Notes is set up so it could be a true information database - you know, a way to store information that isn't a physical file on my hard drive. The rest of the program is completely file-centric. All tagging happens at the file level. I can tag music files with an artist and an album etc, but these artists and albums only exist as values attributed to a particular file. If the file goes away, so too do the artist and album (unless other files share the values of course).
There has been discussion in the past about the potential for use of 'categories', 'entities' etc throughout the program - ie taggable entities that aren't files. This is exactly what you've done with notes, really. What's missing for me is a way to usefully link these 'notes' back to 'files'. It's not April yet, so I won't revive the
YARB thread, but you're actually very close to many of the things we talked about there.
Case example: I want to create an artist database. I want to be able to tag artist entries with artist-specific metadata (bio, nationality, artist image etc). And I can actually do this right now - just create a new note, type in "Abba" as the name and tag it with an "Artist" keyword and... voila, I have created an artist record for abba. I can then tag it with whatever I want using any of the fields in my library. And I can do the same thing with movies, people, albums etc etc. This is totally cool.
So my question is, how can the rest of the media library take advantage of this? How can I link the Contacts in my Notes, to People I've tagged in photos? How can I link artist entries I've created in the notes section with my music?
If a file could be 'tagged' with a 'note' we'd be laughing... If I have a working artist database, I only need to let the program know that this file belongs to "Abba" and all the artist-specific information is inherited. Same goes for movies.
This would also solve a few oft reported issues / requests:
- "I've re-ripped an album, how do I swap the tags over to the new rip" question - if the 'album' info is already in the database the user need simply allocate the new files to the album 'note'.
- Artist images - we could simply assign coverart for artist entries in the notes section
- Series / Season / Episode management - we'd have a way to tag these three levels separately.
If you have some time to spare, I posted
here about some of the advantages that such inheritance would offer.
How are people using notes? Any thoughts?
