GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 102185
Option to browse by file location not id3
Last modified: 2004-12-22 21:47:04 UTC
At the moment rhythmbox is very unforgiving on music collections which are not perfectly tagged. For example large amounts of files in the 'unknown' category and artists appearing several times with small variations "Foo bar", "Foo Bar" etc. It should still be possible to use rhythmbox if the collection is organised hierarchically on disk. e.g. Artist/Album/Song.mp3
Or simply, by filename. ID3 is overkill for me, and I have all the relevant info in the filenames.
*** Bug 125631 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Suggestion: One way to address this issue is to add "Filename" as a possible column in the track window -- i.e., add Filename as one of the possible "Visible Columns" in Edit->Preferences->General. That would solve every need I have to sort by filename. It seems like this is a simpler solution than adding another browsing mode or a filename-to-tag scanner like EasyTag has. (This is my reading of some solutions proposed in other bugs.) and thanks for the software, Rhythmbox is quite nice!
I look for "filename" column in Preferences dialog in every new release, since that is the only sensible way to sort a large music collection. Since sort by filename is not possible, I immediatelly close Rhythmbox since it makes a mess of track order in my albums, and their organization on disk. To be more exact, I need "sort by full path" option, not just the file name. To fully describe the problem, I organize my music in such a way, and lots of others I know do the same: /music /genre1 /label-artist-code-year-group 01_artist1-first_track.mp3 02_artist2-second_track.mp3 03_artist1-final_track.mp3 /label-artist-year-2CD 101_artist-first_track_of_first_cd.mp3 102_artist-second_track_of_first_cd.mp3 201_artist-first_track_of_second_cd.mp3 202_artist-final_track_in_second_cd.mp3 /artist-album-year-2CD /cd1 01_artist-first_track_of_first_cd.mp3 02_artist-second_track_of_first_cd.mp3 /cd2 01_artist-first_track_of_second_cd.mp3 02_artist-second_track_in_second_cd.mp3 /genre2 /artist-album-EP aa_first_track_on_a_side.mp3 ab_another_track_on_a_side.mp3 ba_the_track_on_b_side.mp3 /va-title-year x_artist_one-one_track_on_dubplate.mp3 y_artist_two-another_track_on_dubplate.mp3 /unsorted whatever.mp3 Summary: there are lots of naming conventions. Some of that information is contained in ID3 tags, some of it isn't. In particular, track number is absent from most of mp3's we get, since it's non-standard field in id3 v1 or something. It's very good to use artist, title, album, year, genre from ID3 tags, since it probably is not encoded in filename at all. But, sorting order should be considered correct, unless the rippers are lame and don't put track number as first thing in filename, or at least use artist-01-title.mp3 if all album is by one artist. Come on, Rhythmbox even screws sorting order of albums with all tracks named Unknown Artist - Track X.mp3, where X = 1, 2, 3, ... ! Every other music player I use does correct thing. Those are Winamp, RealOne Player, xmms/beep.
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 78713 ***