GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 593472
New 'filename' column
Last modified: 2018-05-24 14:38:10 UTC
[ From http://bugs.debian.org/544121 ] It would be nice to have a new filename column (not the full path, only the file name). The use case is: "I have a great deal of music that does not obey standard ID3 naming conventions, because those conventions are useless for classical and esoteric music. Since it's hard to deal with arbitrary tags in the player, could Rhythmbox perhaps use "filename" as a full-featured field? For example, I have 32 files whose Title is "Le Nozze di Figaro". They come in a defined order, but Rhythmbox doesn't know that. There is no "Artist" (although there is a "Composer", a "Conductor", several "Performers", etc...). Here's an example filename: Mozart - K.492 Le Nozze di Figaro - (25) Ecco la marcia.ogg It would be really great to allow the playlist to manipulate filename (not URL or Location, or possibly Location with the "file:///home/ben/music" trimmed off the beginning...)."
I don't really like this idea. The actual problem seems to be that we don't have any way to display the composer, conductor, performer, and so on. Using the filename to display a user-constructed combination of those is not only not solving the problem, it's reducing the likelihood of solving the problem in the future.
I guess the original reporter would be happy with improved support for those tags, so that would be fine too.
But how to use improved support for those tags? Some music has "Composer", "Work", "Opus", "Performer", "Partnumber", "Part", etc. Some music has "Artist", "Title", "Tracknumber", etc. That plays poorly with the standard fields-like-a-database model--do you present a table with every field in every file in your collection? I don't see any way to make that usable. The only solution I can see is to have a freeform field somewhere, and to allow it to be used as a full-featured field for listing, sorting, searching, etc. I proposed that the filename could be such a field (also useful for sorting by directory). This is nice for me and many other classical-music--listeners because: 1) Having had no other good option, we already use filename that way. 2) Nobody wants to be tied to Rhythmbox or to any other player. I want to be able to use ogg123 sometimes, or to try other players, or to email songs to someone on another system, or to be able to find the song I'm looking for when Rhythmbox goes the way of all Linux software and is supplanted by something better (sorry, guys, but that happens. Even XFree86 was supplanted by xorg!). Allowing the use of "filename" is easy. Spending months implementing The Correct Solution means that Rhythmbox will probably implement one Correct Solution, Potamus another, xmms2 another, audacious another, mplayer another... if they implement it at all. 3) The "filename" field would be a very quick and easy fix--if not perfect, at least an excellent stopgap--could it do any harm? Maybe The Correct Solution can still be invented, but I would expect it to take a large amount of time and thought and usability testing. There's a(nother) workaround, that offloads the burden onto the user: cram everything into the "Artist"/"Title" etc. But since there is not even a correct "Artist" for classical music (well, there will almost always be at least a composer and a performer who could be tagged as such within "Artist" and often soloists, arrangers, conductors, ensembles, etc) and any number of possibilities for "Title" there is no standard, therefore re-tagging my whole collection is an ad-hoc kludge. I believe it's probably inferior to the ad-hoc kludge under consideration since it requires many users to do a lot of non-standards-compliant work, rather than just having the software make life easy for users? Cheers!
Actually, just searching all Vorbis tags would be brilliant--how cool would it be if my music had all the performers tagged and I could search for "Panzarella" and have everything she sang in pop up? I can't even get everything written by Bach right now because rhythmbox doesn't recognise "Composer"! I still don't know how I would handle display/browsing with unlimited tags.
actually, i would also want to have a column 'filename' without the path, just for display, not for editing.
-- GitLab Migration Automatic Message -- This bug has been migrated to GNOME's GitLab instance and has been closed from further activity. You can subscribe and participate further through the new bug through this link to our GitLab instance: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/rhythmbox/issues/801.