Re: [Muine] [PATCH] incomplete albums

[Jorn Baayen <jbaayen gnome org>]

On Sat, 2005-01-15 at 12:49 -0500, Matthew Good wrote:
> On Sat, 2005-01-15 at 18:03 +0100, Jorn Baayen wrote:
> > Here's a patch doing the total tracks thing then. I haven't commited it
> > yet, as we first need the fixing script.
> > 
> > Jorn
> 
> If something like this is added to Muine, I really don't think it should
> be the default behavior.  I can see that there might be some situations
> in which it would be useful to filter out incomplete albums, however
> what if I want to play all music by a particular artist, including the
> random tracks where I don't have the full album?

First of all, the album dialog has from the start been meant to actually
only show complete albums. The fact that it has shown single songs with
an album tag for the past year is a side effect of lack of creativity ;)

You cannot rely on the "play album" dialog to find ALL music by a
certain artist, as the songs without album artist wont be there. The way
to do this atm is to go into the "play song" dialog, type the name of
the artist, and select all matches.

> Jorn, I know you don't like it, but I'd personally be in favor of
> displaying the track count and play time by each album.  I think that it
> could be made fairly unobtrusive, but it would give people the ability
> to determine at a glance how much music they're getting out of an album.
> Having a new Properties window for an album could be useful for more
> detailed information, like a listing of the available tracks and
> whatever is in the less used tags like the year, etc, but if all I want
> to do is play a good selection Soul Coughing and I can't remember which
> albums are complete, or nearly complete, I don't want to open the
> Properties for every album to figure out which one I'd like to play.  
> 
> Personally, most of my music collection is complete albums, so I
> generally rely on the Play Album dialog for selecting my music.  For me
> it's useful to have the incomplete albums listed in there, or otherwise
> I would probably forget about them (out of sight, out of mind).  I think
> the tracks/time thing would give people the information they need
> without hiding any music away.  

Like I said earlier, the music without album tags is hidden anyway, so
it doesn't really matter. With the planned groups stuff you should be
able to browse music in more ways, and not have to forget about music
that is not in albums. Keeping incomplete albums in the album list is
just a workaround for a different problem: forgetting about music that
is not in the album list. Which needs a REAL fix, which I hope the
groups stuff will provide.

> If Muine does get something for actually filtering albums from the list,
> maybe it should be something like in the Gnome "Search for Files" dialog
> with the "> Show More options" that would drop down a section where the
> user could enter more detailed search criteria: at least X tracks, at
> least X minutes, complete albums, year, etc.  If people want to be able
> to filter the album list, maybe we should give them the options, but I
> don't think it should be something hidden away where they don't realize
> that it's happening.

This isn't a matter of filtering, it's just a matter of showing only
albums. Showing single tracks which just happen to have an album tag in
an album view is broken behaviour.

Search options like you describe there are completely out of the
question. This is Muine, damn it ;)

Cheers,

Jorn