Thread: Anyway to utilize id3 tags?

Originally Posted by senseless228

Is there anyway to have the navigation for the music be based on ID3 tags in the set music folder? instead of the subfolders and filename.mp3? similar to that of an mp3 that organizes it based on artist/album/genre? and have the title instead of the filename?

is there a setting that can make this happen?

I was working on a way to organize by Genre where it just opens the first song of each album that it finds, but there have been problems. Lets say you have 500 singles in a single folder. The program would have to go out and open the first 200 characters in the filename where the ID3 tag is stored. The program would then have to record what it finds either in a temporary grid or database. It could either store it or it could rebuild the grid at each startup or when the user opens the Audio module. In any of these cases, it would take a tremendous amount of time to build, and update, or time to open, etc. I felt that it would be easier to have the user just simply organize their music in Genre folders or by artists/then albums, or by albums, or however they preferred. This would save people from having to go through and make sure all of there ID3 tags are filled out and correct. There are also about 250 or more Genres alone in winamps list. So not only would it take time to read the files in, it would also take time to translate the Genre as it doesnt store a word, it stores a number which would have to be translated to Rock, or Alternative or whatever it happens to be.

I have about 150 albums on my carputer and it takes about 5 to 10 seconds to build the Album art list, which is acceptible, but I tested the same type of thing for genre and it took at least 60 seconds just to do several albums. This obviously isnt an acceptible delay. I have tried several of the other front ends features that can sort by different ID3 tags and every single one of them either have a tremendous delay or they dont sort completely where there are missing files, etc. True it would be extremely nice to be able to hit a button for Albums, and it gives you an alphabetical list, or hit an Artist button, or Genre button and it does the same, but like I said the only way that this can happen is if the program does a search and then stores the information in a database. I think most people would prefer to organzie the folders instead or having to rebuild the database everytime they add or remove music. What does everyone think about this? Please let me know. Thanks.

thank you very much for a relativley quick response, and I'm generally not that picky, so i'm not going to start here, the reason i asked was because since about a month or so ago, when i got an iriver, i decided to make it easy on myself to edit ALL and i mean ALL my id3 tags, and so i did, and then halfway through i decided i didn't need an mp3 player, and returned it, but went ahead and finished cleaning up my id3 tags, luckily my songs are organized by artist then album, so its not too difficult, my filenames are just a bit off, and have random characters and dashes, and was wondering if that last step could be reading off the id3 title variable. But, as it seems, for good reason, you chose against it, and i'll work around it, i might as well go the 100% and organize my music fully, another couple of days and i should the filenames to their proper format...one last question

is there a setting or a .ini i can edit so that there isn't a "<" around the artist/song names, like <Adema>...is this a possibility or no? if there isn't a quick/easy way to solve this then dont worry about it, if there is i'd appreciate a solution, and thank you again for your time, your frontend is the easiest/cleanest i've worked with and i absolutely love it.

Originally Posted by senseless228

is there a setting or a .ini i can edit so that there isn't a "<" around the artist/song names, like <Adema>...is this a possibility or no? if there isn't a quick/easy way to solve this then dont worry about it, if there is i'd appreciate a solution, and thank you again for your time, your frontend is the easiest/cleanest i've worked with and i absolutely love it.

Sorry unfortunately no, the code is extremely simple. The file list you see is actually a dummy box that is reading and populating from an actual filelist that is hidden. I did this because the dummy control that I used is able to be graphical where the actual filelist cant. I added the < > around the folders so that you when you clicked on them it identified them as a folder and not a file. This took only a couple of lines of code versus a page or so which helped the overall speed of the program. I may alter this in future versions as I agree it makes it kind of ugly. Again Thanks for all the input!