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[Polonio]

I recently wrote an article in Winamp forum, and someone suggested me to copy-paste it here. So here it is, with some comments about MJ at the bottom:


--------------------


I have been thinking in my perfect media player. And even I think is a quite simple and obvious thing, I do not find it.

I think the three key features have to be:

1.- A good "media library"
2.- A good "playlist editor"  
3.- A good "tag editor"
4.- Beautiful Interface

Obviously, the perfect media player has to support any audio format, or -at least- the two commonest ones (Mp3, WMA).

About the library:

Winamp3 media library is pretty cool. The best I have seen for mp3 (does not work with WMA files). But I will add some features:

- Most albums are just from one artist, so the album list could be "Artist name - Album name". However, some albums contain multiple artist, so this albums could be managed as "Various artist - Album name". I am not suggesting to eliminate the album and artist lists (on the top of WA Media Library), I suggest to include a new optional presentation following the exposed criteria (mixing artist and album names). Why do I suggest this? Because if I look into the the artists list, I see many artist with few songs (in my library), and usually are artists that I do not recognize, and therefore I do not get a rapid idea of what music is into the library. And because if I look into the albums, I do not always recognize them just for the album name (i need the artist name).

- The media library of my perfect media player would be able to browse by folder name. I know it exists a plug-in that does it. But it would have to be integrated with the library. For instance, the artist list actually can be changed by a album, comment, genre or year list. Why not a folder list? Another option (complementary), would be to add another item under {All media, audio files, CD tracks, http streams, Video files}. This new item would be "My PC", or "My music folder".

Well. Let's talk about the "Playlist editor".

- I would offer the option to the user to select the columns that he wants to see. Why does Winamp just show title, and duration? What about the artist, the album, or the file name? Is it possible to add/remove/arrange/sort columns? It does not seems difficult to implement. I have seen (surprised) similar limitation in many media players/jukeboxes.

Third point: The "Tag editor".

Under my opinion, this is the weakest point of Winamp.

- Why the window is not resizable?
- Why does not appear the lyrics field? Should I use the comments field for lyrics? If so, it is to small to be useful.
- Is it possible to select multiple files and change the album just on one step?

I like the Musicmatch Jukebox tag editor.
I also like the Windows Media capability to tag just from the "Media library" (without an additional form).

I suggest to Winamp to take the best of each one, adding a new feature:

- I would offer the option for renaming an album, or an artist name from the Media Library (the top lists of WA Media Library). All files should be tagged accordingly (in background).

The forth feature of my perfect media player would be a "beautiful interface". Here Winamp is perfect. Far better of anything else.

Well. These are my wills. Am I asking for too much? I do not think so.

I even would pay for it.



Regards,

Polonio


--------------------------

When I wrote that post I didn’t know about MJ. Now, MJ is my preferred player (though I have 6 or 7 installed in my computer ).

MJ is pretty cool, and solve correctly the majority of my demands. However, there is always things to improve. Here some suggestions:

a)  In my perfect media player, tag info should update into files by four ways:

1.- Auto update on change (just like MJ does now)
2.- Update on-demand (would update info files that has been modificated, not all)
3.- Update in background (continuously updating changed info files, without any modal window).
4.- Never update (no change files)

Actually, I do not know how to update just the changed infos. My library has about 4000 files, and I changed about 300 hundreds of them (from different artists, folders, and so on). How can I just update these files without updating the others 3700?

b)  Reading hundreds of files tags will always be a slow action. So why read again the tag if I just want change the album or artist name?

c) Why I cant select/rename a couple of items at the same time from the tree view?

d) I would appreciate the ability to switch between a tree view and a table view of the library. RealOne  (for instance) shows in a table these columns: artist/#clips/total duration, and allow to sort them by any column. Why MJ does not do that? Or does?

e) A stupid warning appears if I change the song name (for instance) while the “Autoupdate tags” is unchecked. If I change a lot of songs at the same time, it results very annoying.

f) “Album artist” or “Has cover” are columns that do no appear in the tables. Why?

g) In my opinion, the best library view is “Artist album/album”. To do that I spent a lot of time for populate correctly the “Artist album” field. It would be possible for MJ to autopopulate this (or other) field? And, why other apps do not see/show this tag?

h) My perfect media player would work with some calculated fields. For instance:

1.- “Artist – Album” (“Queen – Innuendo”, “The Doors – Waiting for the sun”, etc.)
2.- “Top Artists”. The idea is to group artists with few songs in a fictitious artist called “Other artists”.
3.- “Top Albums”. It would group albums with few songs (incomplete albums) or not catalogued songs  in a fictitious album called “Other songs from [artist]”.

The minimum number of songs (or total duration) to be a “real” artist or a “real” album would be customizable.

This way, anyone would be able to organize his own collection with very little effort.


The more important issues for me are a), d) and h). I even would pay for it.

By the way, every option seems to be working without limitation and I didn’t buy the product yet. How long it will work?

Any comment appreciated.
polonio_@yahoo.com

[Scronch]

30 days.  Then the plus features will self-destruct in 5 seconds.  Should you or any members of your team be captured or killed, as always, JimH will disavow all knowledge of your actions.  Good luck, Polonio.

[ChicoSelfs]

[Doof]

I'm responding to the points that I either understand, or know the answer to. I'm having a hard time understanding some of your questions, so bear with me if I'm not answering the questions you're actually asking.

In my perfect media player, tag info should update into files by four ways:

1.- Auto update on change (just like MJ does now)
2.- Update on-demand (would update info files that has been modificated, not all)
3.- Update in background (continuously updating changed info files, without any modal window).
4.- Never update (no change files)

Actually, I do not know how to update just the changed infos. My library has about 4000 files, and I changed about 300 hundreds of them (from different artists, folders, and so on). How can I just update these files without updating the others 3700?

I'm not sure what you're saying here. What tag info is being updated, and why? If you're using MJ as your tag editor, then there should never be a problem with when it updates. Or maybe I'm just really confused about what you're trying to do...

b) Reading hundreds of files tags will always be a slow action. So why read again the tag if I just want change the album or artist name?

Try the inline tag editting instead of opening the files in File Properties. I explained how to do this in my answer for your next question.

c) Why I cant select/rename a couple of items at the same time from the tree view?

You can. Just select all of the files you want to edit, right click on the field you want to edit (like the Genre column, for instance) on one of the selected files, and select Rename. Then just type in your change, hit Enter, and all of the selected files will be changed.

d) I would appreciate the ability to switch between a tree view and a table view of the library. RealOne (for instance) shows in a table these columns: artist/#clips/total duration, and allow to sort them by any column. Why MJ does not do that? Or does?

This is one of those questions that I'm not sure if I'm understanding correctly. When you choose a Media View (Artist\Album) you are presented with a table view of the contents. And you can sort by whatever column you want by clicking on the column header. If you want to always sort by a certain column (or multiple columns) take a look at Settings->Options->Tree & View Settings. You'll find a Sorting options box that you can specify what order you want MJ to sort the columns by.

e) A stupid warning appears if I change the song name (for instance) while the “Autoupdate tags” is unchecked. If I change a lot of songs at the same time, it results very annoying.

This is another one I really don't understand. Are you updating tag info with a third party program? Are you trying to update tag data while a song is playing? What steps exactly are you taking that causes this to happen?

f) “Album artist” or “Has cover” are columns that do no appear in the tables. Why?

I'm told that the table view of MJ9 will be a lot more robust in this area. But now I have a question of my own. Where are you finding the "Has Cover" field?

g) In my opinion, the best library view is “Artist album/album”. To do that I spent a lot of time for populate correctly the “Artist album” field. It would be possible for MJ to autopopulate this (or other) field? And, why other apps do not see/show this tag?

Album Artist is an MJ specific tag. Other apps don't support it because (IMO) other apps aren't as good. The only time you should need to fill in Album Artist is when Album Artist isn't the same as the regular Artist. It's used only for compilation albums. So if you had an album full of various artists, you could fill in "Various Artists" into the Album Artist field and then all of those files would show up under one Artist listing instead of multiple Artist listings in the tree. If Album Artist is left blank, then MJ just uses the Artist tag. So you should only use it when you have a multiple artist album on your hands.

h) My perfect media player would work with some calculated fields. For instance:

1.- “Artist – Album” (“Queen – Innuendo”, “The Doors – Waiting for the sun”, etc.)
2.- “Top Artists”. The idea is to group artists with few songs in a fictitious artist called “Other artists”.
3.- “Top Albums”. It would group albums with few songs (incomplete albums) or not catalogued songs in a fictitious album called “Other songs from [artist]”.

1. That would be handy.
2 & 3. You can do this currently if you want to get into the nitty gritty of Media Views. There are several ways to do it, but one thing that I do is move all of my complete albums into a folder on my harddrive called "Complete Albums" and incomplete albums into a folder called "Incomplete Albums" (I know, real creative!). Then when you define your Media View Scheme, use the Search Criteria box to filter out everything that doesn't have a location of "Complete Albums" or "Incomplete Albums".

The helpfile details all of the different things you can do with the Search Criteria. It's very powerful.

[PeterS]

Hi Polonio,
Thanks for the input. We'll look at your suggestions seriously. We think that MJ PLUS is definitely worth the price. Maybe the best 25 bucks you ever spent!

Also, now that you know MJ is the best jukebox on the planet, perhaps you can educate Winamp users with another post to their forum.

Cheers,

PeterS

[JimH]

Hi Polonio.  Thanks for trying MJ and for all your questions.

Doof, thanks a lot for the answers!

[Polonio]

Hi, Doof.

I will try to explain better my problems/suggestions.

a)

If I check the option “Update tags when file info changes”, I have to wait a while after editing any groups of tags. Since I do not really enjoy looking progress bars, I suggested to update tags in background mode or on-demand. MJ should know what files need to be updated.


b)

If I uncheck the option “Update tags when file info changes”, and I try the inline tag editing, I get the following message for every file I am trying to edit.

“Media Jukebox failed to update the tag information for the edited file. (this happens when files are in use, read-only, or when tagging has been disabled in MJ’s options).”


For that reason, if I have to edit hundreds of tags, it is better to access the file properties.



You say: “If you're using MJ as your tag editor, then there should never be a problem with when it updates.”. And I don’t understand why you said that. Do you check the option “Update tags when file info changes”? Are your files tags updated? How do you exactly update tags? Don’t you see the “Gathering file information… (143 of 367)” message? Don’t you see the “Saving file information… (143 of 367)” message?





c)

I can’t select at the same time two or more artists in the TREE view.


d)

You said:


<>


Yes. I know. I meant that you can’t get an artist list like this one (ordered by number of clips):

Smashing Pumpkins, 44 clips, 3:27:39, 111 MB
John Lennon, 41 clips, 2:21:13, 66 MB
Sting, 39 clips, 2:42:16, 83 MB
…


e)  Commented in the second point.



f) “Has Cover” is a tag that I haven’t seen anywhere. It is just a suggestion. How can I know how many covers I’ve recollected?


g)

About the “Artist Album” tag you said:


<>


Yes, it is what I did. And since it was a so obvious thing, I suggested that it could be done automatically.

h)

My perfect media player would work with some calculated fields. For instance:

1.- “Artist – Album” (“Queen – Innuendo”, “The Doors – Waiting for the sun”, etc.)
2.- “Top Artists”. The idea is to group artists with few songs in a fictitious artist called “Other artists”.
3.- “Top Albums”. It would group albums with few songs (incomplete albums) or not catalogued songs in a fictitious album called “Other songs from [artist]”.

And you said:


<<1. That would be handy.
2 & 3. You can do this currently if you want to get into the nitty gritty of Media Views. There are several ways to do it […]>>


Yes, yes, a lot of ways to do it. But I was told that MJ was easy to use. For me, click a button is an easy thing.


Think about it a second. Would not be great the automatic creation of a “Other artists” folder to group songs from artist with few songs in your library? Does not botter you play an album and realize that only have two or three songs?

With these calculated fields (“top artists”, “top albums”, “Album artist”) almost every collection could be well organized without any effort (no folder distribution, no much tagging, no complicated rules …).

I hope these message do not be misunderstood. I like very much how MusicMatch works. But nothing is perfect.

Yet…

[Doof]

It's Media Jukebox, not MusicMatch, unless you're really talking about MusicMatch. Just trying to clarify that, as a lot of people seem to get the two confused for some reason.

I like the idea of MJ doing a lot of things automatically. The problem with automatically doing anything is that you then lose flexibility. Just because you want MJ to automatically seperate your library into Complete Albums and Other Artists doesn't mean I do, or anybody else for that matter. Giving MJ the power to do things in a flexible manner means everybody can organize their library the way they want to, but it does mean sacrificing the automatic nature. It's a tradeoff, and quite frankly I'd take flexibility over automatic anyday. Microsoft is the king of automatic lately, and I don't know how many times I've cursed MS for thinking they know what I want to do when in reality they are only making my job harder. The same goes for Album Artist, actually. I don't want mine to say Various Artists, so I wouldn't want MJ automatically sticking Various Artists into Album Artist.

As for the tag updating questions... Yes, I do get the Gathering File Information and Saving File Information dialog boxes. They just never bothered me. I'm not actually clear on what it is you think is happening then, and what you want. When you load files into File Properties, MJ is reading in the tag data so you can edit it. And then it saves the changes you made. If you select "Update Changed Files" from File Properites, then MJ won't bother saving information for files that haven't changed. Having MJ do it in the background or on demand (I'm assuming you mean that as you make the change in File Properties, MJ saves the change right then) would be nice, I agree. But I can live with it the way it is. It probably helps that I fixed all of my tags ages ago and so I don't need to do any mass tag editting anymore.

Try right clicking on Media Library and choosing "Statistics". It's not everything you're looking for, but it's close. And a lot of people have been trying to get that expanded for a while now. Maybe version 9 will have a more extensive stats view.

If you click on Media Library, you can get a listing of all of your files. From there you can select multiple files, from multiple artists, and use the inline tag editting to change fields all at once.

Sorry that this post isn't as organized as my last one. I haven't eaten lunch yet.

[KingSparta]

>> Winamp3 media library is pretty cool.
I think it sucks rat excretions

[Polonio]

Doof wrote:

> It's Media Jukebox, not MusicMatch, unless you're really talking
>about MusicMatch.

Bufff... Yes, yes, I know. I get offuscated for a second, the jukebox I like is defenitevely Media Jukebox. I just have seen to many jukeboxes in a few days... Sorry.

 

I may comment the rest of your post later. It is time to dinner.

See you.

[Polonio]

I like the idea of MJ doing a lot of things automatically. The problem with automatically doing anything is that you then lose flexibility. Just because you want MJ to automatically seperate your library into Complete Albums and Other Artists doesn't mean I do, or anybody else for that matter. Giving MJ the power to do things in a flexible manner means everybody can organize their library the way they want to, but it does mean sacrificing the automatic nature. It's a tradeoff, and quite frankly I'd take flexibility over automatic anyday. Microsoft is the king of automatic lately, and I don't know how many times I've cursed MS for thinking they know what I want to do when in reality they are only making my job harder. The same goes for Album Artist, actually. I don't want mine to say Various Artists, so I wouldn't want MJ automatically sticking Various Artists into Album Artist.

I also appreciate flexibility, but I think "calculated tags" can be implemented without loosing flexibility, since if you do not want to organize your music that way, yo do not have to do it.

Anyway, there are good points in your observations. Hope MJ developers do theirs best.  

As for the tag updating questions... Yes, I do get the Gathering File Information and Saving File Information dialog boxes. They just never bothered me. I'm not actually clear on what it is you think is happening then, and what you want. When you load files into File Properties, MJ is reading in the tag data so you can edit it. And then it saves the changes you made. If you select "Update Changed Files" from File Properites, then MJ won't bother saving information for files that haven't changed. Having MJ do it in the background or on demand (I'm assuming you mean that as you make the change in File Properties, MJ saves the change right then) would be nice, I agree. But I can live with it the way it is. It probably helps that I fixed all of my tags ages ago and so I don't need to do any mass tag editting anymore.

I already fixed my tags (three days of hard work), so I think that issues will not bother me anymore. Anyway, I belive new users would appreciate new options for updating tags.

One more thing: When I say "on demand" I mean a button that would sincronize library information and file information. Library information would transfer into file tag information (but only of those files that have been changed in the media library, not all files). Remember I was thinking in three options:

-Update tag when file info changes (just like now)
-Update tag on demand (would update all file tag when user say)
-Update in background

By the way, if I purchase MJ8, will I update free to future versions?

[Polonio]

>> Winamp3 media library is pretty cool.
I think it sucks rat excretions

I like the idea of having three sincronized pannels:

-One for album artist (or wharever you want)
-One for albums (or wharever you want)
-One for tracks

This way, there is not much need of tree views, and that means less scrolling.

Furthermore, under my point of view, Winamp3 interface is the most "beautiful" I know. Unfortunately, Winamp tagging sucks.


I have to recognize I have not worked with Winamp3 library because it does not support WMA files. 95 % of my collection is WMA.