Album Properties vs Track Properties

[Teknojnky]

Things that should (IMO) be (optionally) organized via ALBUMID vs TRACKID.

Album ART - In order to maintain consistent album art tags, album art should be stored by ALBUMID and art at the track level should be auto-updated to be consistent with Art at the ALBUM level.

Album YEAR - Albums are normally associated with a release year, any tracks belonging to a specific album should inheirate/auto-update from the ALBUM YEAR.

Genre - I am sure that not everyone would agree, but conversely I am sure that others associate GENRE at an ALBUM or even ARTIST level instead of per TRACK basis.

Notes - No doubt that many notes would be better suited to ALBUM level instead of individual TRACK notes such as Amazon/AllMusic comments. Now MM already DOES have ALBUM level notes, however the only place it appears to show up is by right clicking an album NODE and viewing its properties.

Other fields - I don't know what other fields that folks use that might well be better suited to album level instead of track, I can see mood/occasion/quality also being used at an album level for those who use those fields (I don't use them myself).

In summary, I would like to see UI enhancements that make available and utilize ALBUM level metadata, from which TRACK level metadata can inheirate from and from which are displayed (and identified) as album info on the track properties.

And of course an option to force track fields to inherate from album fields (where available). Unknown ALBUM metadata should/could inherate from known track properties.

[Lowlander]

Album art belonging to album would be nice. But how would you manage album art stored in tags?

Year, I manage year by album release date, too much work to go by track and anyway Amazon only shows release date of the album.

Genre for me is a per track thing. There are a lot of artists who wander around genre's.

Album notes and artist notes should be available in other places as well. I'm not sure where this would fit best though. (I've inlcuded it in WebMonkey myself when showing tracks as albums).

I think you would need a sort of albumlisting to be able to show this in a nice way. The current tracklisting isn't really suited for this.

[Pablo]

I second the idea of an album tracklisting with album-level properties (year, notes/comments, producer, label, etc).

[Teknojnky]

Album art belonging to album would be nice. But how would you manage album art stored in tags?

Mediamonkey would/should auto-update related album tracks any time the "album art" is updated or whenever an individual track is detected to be inconsistent with the art associated with the album.

Year, I manage year by album release date, too much work to go by track and anyway Amazon only shows release date of the album.

Right, so whenever a year is updated for an album, ALL TRACKS on that album, should be updated as well.

Genre for me is a per track thing. There are a lot of artists who wander around genre's.

/nod, this is why it should be optional for those who wish to associate such metadata at the album or per track.

Album notes and artist notes should be available in other places as well. I'm not sure where this would fit best though. (I've inlcuded it in WebMonkey myself when showing tracks as albums).

I think you would need a sort of albumlisting to be able to show this in a nice way. The current tracklisting isn't really suited for this.

/nod, currently the track properties do not include UI elements which indicate if they are track or album related.

Part of my request is for UI improvements which would make this apparent and allow for the user to see and change both when viewing any individual track.

A simple way to indicate this, would be to simply display <album> related fields/metadata as in Parenthsis.

IE

Year: (2005) 2001

where (2005) = the album year, 2001 = the track year.

Alternatively, Album metadata could be displayed in a different font/color/background.

[Steegy]

MediaMonkey always uses the the data it has from a certain track (e.g. file's tags and library contents) and this is obviously the most correct way.

But you are right, album art should be a managed at album art level, and maybe some other things too.

However, I'm not convinced about the year and genre properties of an album.
Yes, the year property seems to be used as "album release year" by most people, but who says that's the right thing? Isn't there a "album release year" ID3v2 frame to use instead?
I actually don't really care when an album is released because that's irrelevant. If it is relevant, it'll be included in the album name (like "Donna's Top 2006").
E.g. I want the year field from an old ABBA track to contain the creation year of that track, and not the year that the album is released (like a "Best Of" album, that is released in 2005..., that doesn't change anything to the original music on the cd, so the year should be the original year).
And what would be the purpose of the "Year" node then?
I want to say, let's listen to some tracks made last year, and I don't want to hear ABBA music in between because that's *not* music from last year (even if the "Best Of" album was released in that year).

Also, I want the genre for each track to be separate. Many many many albums exist with most tracks of a certain genre and then some tracks of another genre. This should remain that way.
BTW: If you want the genres for a complete album to be the same (so you *don't* have a detailed info for your tracks), but you want support for styles, genres, subgenres, ... (detailed) that's kind of contradictive isn't it?

If this is implemented in MediaMonkey (what would be a good thing of course), I would want it to be optional (as you already said). People want to be able to choose what they want, to be free in their choices. MediaMonkey has always been very good with this.
Also please understand that first all ID3v2 frames would have to be supported, so we can really tag our tracks in the way that it's supposed to be. (e.g. album release year in that particular frame).


More important imho is that the "multiple/splitted Various Artists album listing" problem would be fixed. This problem still appears, you know.
I mean, an album with tracks with different artists, but all with the same album artist "Various Artists". It still sometimes happens that the album artist changes to the artist value, and so "splits" the album into separate albums. (And we have to use Maintain Library of the "files to edit > multi-artist albums" tree node to fix it. It shouldn't be damaged in the first place.)
Hopefully the dev's read this ...


Anyway, please, nobody feel offended by this "speaking frankly". That's just some rather annoying characteristic of myself . Always trying to convince people to what I think is best ...

So I propose to wait first for the full ID3v2 implementation. What you are asking can be done manually quite easily, so it probably isn't a top priority.


Cheers
Steegy

[danielbritt]

id like the track/album properties to be visible...maybe in a pane next to the player. in the past ive used orangecd and i like how i can click on an album, see the review/comments and the cover all on one page.

thanks, daniel