Re: [Rhythmbox-devel] Structure in genres

[Peter Colijn <pcolijn gmail com>]

On 7/11/05, James Livingston <jrl ids org au> wrote:
> "Personal tags" are just that, personal. They aren't the kind of thing
> that would be stored in MusicBrainz, and probably wouldn't even be
> written back into the file - just stored in the database.
>
> As with f-spot's tags, they aren't name-value pairs (like traditional
> music metadata), but a set of values that each track can have, or not
> have.

This sounds a lot like Gmail's labels, in that these tags are not
hierarchical (I'm assuming) and any particular item can belong to 0, 1
or many tags. Correct?

> As an example, I currently have a playlist called "Relaxing", which
> contains songs that I have playing as background while reading or
> something. Instead of creating a playlist and adding songs to it, I
> could add the personal tag "relaxing" to all of the songs.
>
> I could create a automatic playlist with the criteria 'has personal tag
> "relaxing"' (or have the automatically created for all personal tags).
> Also we have another part to the browser for personal tags, in addition
> to genre, artist and album.

I must say, I really like this idea. There's a big debate at Google
(or there was; I suppose it's mostly over :) about whether labels are
"good enough." i.e. do you need hierarchy? For data humans interact
with a lot, it turns out that hierarchy is pretty confusing, so a
1-level "membership" type "hierarchy" (a la labels or tags) works
quite well, whereas a multi-level hierarchy does not. In fact, things
like Beagle and Spotlight serve to flatten the filesystem hierarchy
into dynamic "tags" of a sort, so it seems there is quite widespread
acknowledgement of this.

If you think of the current approach Rhythmbox is taking, it is
somewhat hierarchical. In that there are albums and artists, and the
former reside "inside" the latter, although there is a flat view of
albums. I know I've certainly found this confusing, for example when I
click on an artist and one of the albums I expect to see isn't there,
because of a tag mismatch (eg. "Cranberries" vs. "The Cranberries").
We could attempt to fix *that* issue, but any attempts would be messy
and never 100% Tags let the user get around these issues and provide
other functionality as well.

My $0.02 CAD :P

Peter