Re: [Banshee-List] [feature suggestion] library structure

[Nicholas Doyle <niskel gmail com>]

On Tue, 2009-02-10 at 09:42 +0100, Benjamín Valero Espinosa wrote:
> 2009/2/10 Christopher James Halse Rogers
>         You already can, as I mentioned.
>          /apps/banshee-1/library/folder_pattern
>         and file_pattern.  And I think Banshee certainly wants to
>         cater for
>         non-coders!
> 
> Well, in my case I don't like to put a period between the track number
> and the track title, and there's no option in the list for that, so I
> modified it with the GConf editor. Anyway, perhaps it would be nice to
> have some "Advanced" button besides the options list where all the %
> xxx% are listed and can be added.

I think one of the best ways to do this is to maintain the dropdown
menus that are already there. In the drop down menus you would add a
'Custom' option to the end (preferably separated from the other options
by a separator. Clicking this 'Custom' option would bring up a form with
the custom editor. I am not opposed to having to type a string with some
variables here as long as there is a legend on the form itself of the
available options.

This makes sure that the easy options are still discoverable and still
lets anyone picky to customize their own structure.

This is a lot better than the way I am doing it now with a self
maintained patch :) (because disc information is not available without
it).

Also I believe there should be some different default options. The
current options are pretty terrible in regards to sorting music in a
good way. The recent patch for %album_artist% helps a lot to fix this
but we are still missing a %disc% option which is essential for sorting
music properly. Also having the %year% after %album% doesn't make any
sense at all when you are trying to sort music (sorting albums by name
is much less relevant to me than sorting albums by date).

For the record, these are my library structure patterns. In my mind they
are perfect. :)

file_pattern:   "%disc%-%track_number% %title%"
folder_pattern: "%album_artist%%path_sep%(%year%) %album%"



For my last nit pick on the subject, having excessive 'control
characters' to separate fields in a file name bother me when they are
not necessary. For example "%track%. %title%" or "%track% - %title%" is
annoying compared to "%track% %title%". "%track% %title%" remains
unambiguous and does not inflate my (often long) filenames by one or two
characters; it also looks cleaner in my opinion. Having default options
to not have them would be pretty nice. Again, this last point is nit
picky, particularly if the file structure was customizable in the UI.