Re: [Muine] [Patch] Better album defining

[Ola Ormset <ola-muinlist ormset no>]

On Mon, 2004-05-24 at 18:27, iain wrote:
> On Mon, 2004-05-24 at 17:49 +0200, Viet Yen Nguyen wrote:
> 
> > For music tags there is, one of those programs is called easytag. Since
> > this program exists, and does work well to a certain degree and/or
> > perspective, a workaround would not be necessary. 

Viet:
Heh. Yes. Easytag is a nice program when you have a few Albums to keep
track of. I currently have some 63GB music, totalling to more than 12k
songs. And a majority of those is poorly tagged, ie. given to me from my
windows using friends which have no consept of case sensitivity and
being standards compliant (comes with the territory). And a lot of songs
are just slabbed into one huge folder as well. Using easytag to fix all
those song would take something that vaguely resembles an eternity. I'd
rather prefer my music player to be somewhat forgiving and at least make
an attempt at understanding real-life music collections.

> "Waltz for Koop" or "Waltz For Koop"
> Which is right, which is wrong?
> I don't want to tag my music and worry about minutia like "This album
> doesn't have the same tag as this album", I just want the 6 songs from
> "Waltz for Koop" to appear as the one album.

I agree. This case sensitivity problem should be solved.

> Note that I'm not talking about asking Muine to correct insanely poorly
> tagged files, like fixing a Mr Scruff song thats been tagged as Britney
> Spears, just the obvious things that can be easily fixed without users
> looking at it and thinking "Why didn't that just work?" 

Very well put.

> 
> It seems that to head down the "Muine only works with a correctly tagged
> and 'correctly' organised music collection" road is making a wonderfully
> simple music player for the techno-cultured elite who even know what a
> tag is.

> 
> And for what its worth, knowing why "Waltz for Koop" and "Waltz For
> Koop" don't match, knowing that you can fix it, finding out how to fix
> it, finding easytag, downloading it, compiling it, installing it and
> then running it and sitting for a long time to fix the tags (I've got
> about 1000 mp3s, most of which have something wrong with the tags, I
> have friends who have many many more, with worse tags than mine), is not
> userfriendly when all you *really* want to do, is simply hear some
> music.

The core of the problem. Most of us actually have jobs, and use music as
a protective screen from the cubical buzz on the workplace, or when
commuting. We don't have time to sit down and organize all that music.
And using an mp3 player that pretends to be a fancy and state of the art
graphical application that doesn't act in a way that is expected from
such an app is just plainly annoying and a disturbance of the peace of
mind. I rather prefer using xmms, which has a UI that sucks, but doesn't
try to be more than a practical approach to playing music.

But that said, I really like muine. The UI idea with album search, song
search and cover art fetching is brilliant.

However, it has a few camels I really can't make myself swallow. Such as
using mono (29MB installed just to use a music player..) The so far
lacking support of ability to cooperate with other programs as well.
Then we have the strictness of the developers that want to force people
into using a lot of time to organize their music collections so that
muine may present them in a pretty, even sexy, manner. You can't expect
it to be a massively used application in this way.

I don't want to waste more time and attention on something that has good
intentions, has a good UI idea, but then just leaves a bad taste in my
mouth because it's so unpractical and featureless (ever heard of the
nice "shuffle" function, which even mpg123 has??). I will see you guys
when version 2.0 hits freshmeat.


> Sorry for ranting.
Yes, well. I don't like to rant either, but sometimes you can't keep the
mouth shut anymore.

Best wishes, Ola.

(Iain: This isn't really directed to you personally, but more as my
personal feelings towards muine and The Act of Playing Music [tm] - also
known as my two cents and a banana.)