Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[nila]

There have been several discussions about the overwhelming number of fields.

For me personally it's with tagging - it's out of control and NOT easily manageable. For some people it's with adding columns, panes etc.

The number of fields can be HUGE - especially once we start adding our own. It's great that we can but just having them in one big list makes them totally unmanageable.

v10 now also introduces 'Media Mode' system which sounds great. Seperate MC into modes depending on the Media Type we plan to play.


My idea was to allow us to create GLOBAL media types of our own into which we can put any fields we want with fields being in multiple types.

We could create Types/Groups like this:

Music
Lectures
Home Videos
Films
Holliday Photos
etc.

and put any fields we wanted inside each group with fields overlapping between several.


When we go to tag we could then chose any of these as groups to tag with, along with 'all fields' and also when going to 'Add Column', 'Add Pane' etc it would all be nested into the groups we had created with the fields inside those groups.

We'd also be able to, when creating new views, load up that Media Type as the column setting with all it's panes.



It'd REALLY sort out the overwhelming number of fields and give us control over them.
Seeing as your just starting v10 I figured it was a perfect time to suggest it.

Comments? Ideas? Any chance?

[Mirko]

Wonderful idea!
It would be a combination of a custom panel-view and custom tag-view.

Alternative:
Let the user build custom tag-groups like the already builtin ("Audio", "General", "Display" and so on), e.g. "Classical", which has Director, Orchestra and so on (already in my database).

Mirko

[Marko]

Please can we have this?

[Mirko]

After thinking about the idea, I have some thoughts I would like to write down:

1. If the different fields are only used within one mode, would it make sense to save the tag-info in the files? I mean, how may MC decide which fields to save inside the files and which not - the user can easily change the behaviour and MC has to re-tag all the files?
2. The idea behind tags is, that using a number of fields man can categorize the files - so I think it's very important, that the tendecies towards "specialized field for _one_ reason" do not grow.
3. Think about Database-design "normalisation" - it's quite important to not have overlapping intentions of fields but rather generalized ones.

Mirko

[nila]

Mirko,
The tag info saving to file would be done exactly as it is done now - that wouldn't change so nothing would change there.
This would be a purely cosmetic/GUI change in terms of organisation, all the functionality is already there, just how the fields are gouped changes.

And as for generalised tags - it doesn't work for a 'One stop solution to all your media' - you need to be able to have fields specific to your media type and even one type of file can have many different uses with different information.

• Take an mp3 - it can be music with artist, album, track # etc

or it can be a lecture with: Lecturer, Topic, Class, etc.

• Photo's I dont want: Artist, Name, Album

I want: People, Country, Place, Event, etc.

• Video's - I want:  Choreographer, Dancers, Show, Time, Music - for my dance performance video's

same ones as standard for music for my music video's along with the above info
Home video's I want more the same as I do for photos' etc.


And it's going to change for EVERYONE depending on THEIR media and what they want to save.

Having to put information in the wrong fields works but is not efficient or clear to anyone except us as to what we've done.
I could put choreographer in the artist field but it just make the whole thing more confusing and less clear to me or anyone else

[Mirko]

I agree with the most points.

My main point is with "generalized" fields, that I think the user should _try_ using already defined fields - sure, if no field matches, let him create one (I did so myself).
I am only a little bit concerned, if such a functionality would motivate people to do more custom fields and so make the whole tagging things more or less useless (think about it this way: I tag pop+rock+house+dance the same. But I _could_ tag house another way (e.g. "label", "original by", "remixed by")... hm... maybe I should - well, someone more extreme might tag every genre another way, so the tags themselfs are without use in organizing and such).

Mirko

[nila]

Not quite following how it's making it useless for other people?

Presuming you are talking about a single installation of MC - say I created a field called: Remix - then put all the remix info into that - it'd help me sort my music better but I dont see how it'd effect anyone else?

Anyone using my setup would see the Remix field set up in my library?

For other people using their own copy of MC they'd have no idea what I'd done so it wouldn't effect them?

Sorry - just not following what u mean

[Mirko]

MC organices using the tag-fields as filter-criterias. So if you add your own, MC can filter by those - _but_ for files which don't have these fields (or some default value) this would be useless. And the more you make custom fields the more the filters will get useless, because you already filtered by using the custom fields in the first place (thats the important point: the more you go into details with fields the more you loose the "global" view which is necessary to do filtering of big databases e.g. music-libraries).

Now you probably use "Artist" for music and images. But would you use "Photographer" for music?

Is this better explained? My english is very, very bad I fear.

Mirko

[nila]

Dont worry about your english - your doing a WHOLE lot better than me as you speak pretty good english and I cant speak your language at all so your already one up.


As for the filters, I'm not quite following - most of MC we can create our own filters based on fields we chose etc so if we create custom fields we just filter by these?

I wouldn't use photographer for music - I use it for Photo's
And if we could create custom gropus I'd put 'Photographer' into the Photos group I'd create?
Any filters would then be created by me based on my 'Photos group' ?


Anyway doesn't matter, this is all just trying to work out details on something that doesn't exist. Hopefully at some point it might so we'll be able to discuss and work it out then.

I just really hope something is done about grouping of fields because this was/is one of the biggest pains for me in v9.

[JimH]

Nila,
We're not ready to consider this.  Maybe later.