Re: [Rhythmbox-devel] Tagging songs (not ID3, lastfm style)

["Andrew Conkling" <andrew conkling gmail com>]

On 9/14/07, James Doc Livingston <doclivingston gmail com> wrote:

Rhythmbox has had partial support this for a few months, however there
is current no user interface to access it.

Things like being able to create playlists from tags is fairly obvious,
but none of us had designed a good interface for tagging songs yet.

I haven't really used music players that support tagging, of the
applications that already do this, what seems to be a good interface for
tagging songs? I imagine that the best interface is probably different
if you're doing mass tagging (because support just got added, or you
just started using RB), compared to the "everyday" tagging when you just
want to change a few songs.

If you or anyone else could point out which apps do this well, or doing
some user interface mock-ups of how you'd like it to work that would be
great.

Well, I'm not real good at mockups, but I can post some ideas here. F-Spot and 
del.icio.us (via the Firefox extension) might be the only applications I've used that support tagging, so I'm not sure how other music players do it, but for reference I know that Amarok and gmusicbrowser support it.

What del.icio.us does well is allow for a combination of keyboard and mouse input for editing tags. You can type the names (which auto-complete) or choose them from some of yours and others' popular tags (I could see this being very useful to get some tags based on the artist).

To bring that to RB, maybe there could be a textbox beneath the library list where tags could be modified (for whatever is selected above--single or multiple tracks) and clicking on them (or a little X next to it) would remove the tag.

And/or we could put another column in the list for single-song tagging, though that could easily become crowded the way I use tags (read: lots of them). :)

Come to think of it, F-Spot has this kind of textbox at the bottom. What I don't like about F-Spot is how to add tags--either via the context menus or the sidebar, it just seems too tedious. Maybe I should look at that textbox. :)

Hope there's some useful stuff here!

Cheers,
Andrew