Excellent post. It was the "database" behind the "player" which drew me to MC in the first place - it was truly the first program, that I'm aware of anyway, that did this properly. I agree that metadata is one of the most important parts of any digital media solution. At the most basic level, it really comes down to "I need to know how to find that song (or movie etc)" and "What song am I listening to". As Addict pointed out though, it's become a lot more than that as well. People want to know more about what they're listening to / watching / looking at. While "Links" and internet searches can certainly find this information, it's not as easy as an automatic lookup and storage in the file's metadata IMHO.
As far as its implementation in the program goes... there are three important aspects. Some have been touched on above.
1. Getting the MetadataAt some point, SOMEONE has to do a manual submission. That's unavoidable. Lookup services like YADB, CDDB, gracenote get us the basic info. As YADB has grown (and expanded to include movies) I believe MC is doing okay here. As Addict pointed out though, there are a lot of other (untapped?) sources of info out there with some really cool stuff. A lot of users, myself included, would really love to have this stored in the database. It keeps it local, and it affords you some element of control over the data displayed (let's face it, "links" and web searches can be hit and miss). Personally, I'd be interested in much of what Addict said he had to offer... I'd also like to see more "plugins" to hook into online sources - I like YADB (and use it regularly) but it's really only useful for basic info (name, album, artist, genre, year)
2. Storing the MetadataAt the user level this really comes down to choice - do I want to store everything in embedded tags, or just in the database? Do I want to keep MPL backups? If I, personally, have any request here, it would be some ability to store information in "sidecar" files, next to the actual file - for files which don't support embedded metadata (or which MC can't write tags to).
In terms of the database itself, Like Leezer, I'm a big supporter of a relational approach to storing data for all the reasons he mentioned above (and a few more!). It has been requested in the past if you do a search. My name might come up once or twice
3. Making use of the MetadataOkay, so we have all this awesome info now. But what do we do with it? Navigation is a big factor, and perhaps the most obvious one - we need to know a little bit of information about a file if we ever hope to find it in a search or by drilling down through lists.
But one area I think MC is really lacking in here, is display of metadata. I have a movie. I have details about the director, year, a synopsis. I have a review. How do I display it? Much the same can be said for albums as well. The Tag AW is really meant for, well... tagging - not a visually friendly representation of the data. If I'm in theatre view, I have less luck still. As some recent posts have described, users often feel the need to learn a little bit more about that thumbnail before clicking the play button (or indeed, once they discover they really like that song and would love to know more about it).
The new "Links" feature covers this to an extent. This is, however, not the same as metadata - it launches a browser, removing the user from their current view Don't get me wrong, I love this feature and use it a lot - it does what it does well - but I think that if the user has managed to carefully build up a database with useful metadata, surely there needs to be a way to display it?
If MC could
- get my main music info from allmusic.com (AMG), with other stats and interesting tidbits from MusicBrainz and LastFM
- get my movie and TV info from allmovie.com (AMG) and IMDb
- organise it all in a way that
People (Artists, Composers, Performers, Actors, Directors, Producers),
Albums and
Movies/Shows were navigable in a relational way
- display relevant metadata in a meaningful way, both in standard view and theatre view
... I, for one, would be one very happy media-hoarder. And I think you'd really have someone that no one else does.