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

[From: Felipe Contreras]

On 5/21/07, Karoliina Salminen <karoliina.t.salminen at nokia.com> wrote:
> 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!

There are some tools:

http://pwp.netcabo.pt/paol/tagtool/
http://easytag.sourceforge.net/
http://www.gnomefiles.org/app.php/gmusicbrowser

Best regards.

-- 
Felipe Contreras