[maemo-developers] What's wrong with folder browsing?

[From: Karoliina Salminen]

Hi,


ext Kalle Vahlman wrote:
>
>> Folder approach is intuitive, shared by all reasonable apps on all
>> platforms, doesn't waste anything and just works.
>>     
>
> It does waste the users time (in the long run), which to me seems more
> important than the machines time.
>   
It pretty much depends on the user and if there are mp3-tags present on
the files, I would like to have
both ways available because:
I happen to have a tag-messy music library (which is organized to
folders, which is not my fault - I have done a lots of work to make
compilations of various mp3-files I have got from my artist friends, but
the tags being inconsistent is the fault of
the author and encoder of the mp3-files) because my library consists of
mostly indie music done by
some friends. Obviously there are no mp3-tags on place and the files are
organized with
folders only (as the author of the file haven't been too interested to
put the tags on place especially
if the file is unfinished track that is just given out for
review-listening), playing full albums (which are
based on these files without mp3-tags or varying mp3-tags like Track 1
"Fin:Greenblue 1"
Track 2 "fin: Green blue 2" Track 3 "FIN: Blue Green3" Track 4
"Christian Worton:greenblue 4" Track 5 "Fin: Greenblue 5" Track 6:
"Unknown artist:Green Blue 6" ...
and so forth. This ends up being several artists and several albums on
system which blindly indexes the files based on the mp3 tags, which is
pretty problematic and which isn't my fault as listener and
it makes me pretty confused. The only solution currently to my
understanding, in media players only supporting
mp3-tag based organization is to play the files one by one which is not
so nice for listening to
background music.

Now I could imagine a brilliant tool that would sort of solve this problem:
A program or script that would run on linux and which would go and scan
all the subfolders in the media
folder and put the tags to the mp3-files on place so that the album name
would be created from the folder name and the track name from the
filename. Obviously it should do this without re-encoding the files
(since re-encoding would degrade sound quality in lossy compression). If
such tool already exists, I would love to hear where I can get it, I
would really
need one since I can't really blame the various authors of my
mp3-collection since if I am getting better indie music than
commercial music is for free, I can't really complain, having
inconsistent mp3-tags is small issue taken in account that
the music is superb quality, glitches on tags, but no glitches on music!

Best Regards,
Karoliina