[Muine] tag editing

[Sean Hammond <sean hammond gmail com>]

I would just like to express the opinion that it is really important
for tag viewing and editing to be integrated into muine.

Since muine makes so much use of the tag information for sorting and
describing the songs and albums, it needs to allow the user to control
this information.

I think it is pretty crucial to enable editing of all the usual fields:

Artist, song, album, genre..

and to enable mass editing, so that I can easily select a dozen tracks
and set the same album name for all of them in one operation, or
select a hundred tracks and set the artist name for all of them.

I think this can reasonably be done without cluttering the UI, just
add a right-click menu option labelled 'change song information' or
something and have it open a fairly simple dialog like the muine dev
website suggests.

Non-technical users in particular would probably do fine correcting
the artist or album name of a song if the functionality was easily in
muine, but are unlikely to understand that muine is usung an id3 tag
encoded into the mp3 file that is totally independent of the filename
and a special program is needed to edit the tag.

Even for technical users, I find the advantage of these new, modern
music playing apps over something like XMMS or beep-media-player is
that I don't have to bother with all the filenames, folder names and
sorting and finding and dragging the correct files into a playlist to
play them. Muine's built-in sorting and searching deals with it, and
my music folder can be a big mess for all I care. But when a whole
load of my files aren't treated correctly by muine because they have
the wrong id3 tag info (this can be as simple as having two bands
'Smashing Pumpkins' and 'The Smashing Pumpkins', or having a bunch of
random songs under 'Unknown Artist', things like this are common) and
I have to run some additional application on my music files and
folders to correct all the tags, then the advantage of muine
disappears. I have to expend as much effort correcting all the id3's
as I would just sorting my files manually and editing filenames for
XMMS.

The development website expresses the notion that id3 tag editing
belongs in a seperate, specialised app. I generally agree with the
design idea of 'do one thing and do it well', particularly for UI's,
but I think if Muine is going to make such fundamental use of id3 tags
it should allow the user to quickly and easily control them without
having to close muine, run a seperate app, then re-try in muine.

Having Muine insist on putting some songs in the wrong place because
of the id3 tag and refuse to let me simply correct it is frustrating.

For third party apps - there is really no particularly good UI app for
editing the id3 tags anyway. Best thing I can find for Gnome is
cantus3 which is not great. And requiring the use of a seperate app
reveals the technical detail about the id3 tags, knowledge which
should not be necessary for playing music.

If I can just click on a song and instantly correct the artist name or
album etc in muine when I notice it is wrong, this successfully
removes the workload of me having to sort my files. I can just do one
quick and simple operation every now and then when I notice a problem.

I think what the dev site suggests - a seperate, simple dialog for tag
editing, looks good. Ideally, I would also like to be able to click on
stuff that muine displays - album name, song, artist, album cover and
change it right there in the playlist, add song or add album views.

What is the state of this feature in Muine CVS right now?