[quote="MMFrLife"]5 more would be great as long as they are coded to write to the tag like the original 5 (no 'MM only' stuff). :)[/quote]
Also, if you could make them 'multi-item' capable. Is that even possible with the Custom Fields?

10 overall!
(5 plain, 5 multi-item)

equals --> [i]custom fields issue put to rest[/i] :wink:

It should *, it's designed to be faster than MM4.

* Hardware does matter with larger Libraries. Especially hard drive speed of the database can impact how fast MediaMonkey reacts.

My mp3 library is nearly 300,000 cuts. Can 5 handle it?

5 more would be great as long as they are coded to write to the tag like the original 5 (no 'MM only' stuff). :)

Request of more and better Custom fields added as http://www.ventismedia.com/mantis/view.php?id=14365.

Thanks,
Jiri

[quote="TIV73"]The CustomX tags are an ideal solution for this issue. They allow a user to save exactly what data he wants, and I believe I somewhere saw an option to change the label of the fields.[/quote]

I haven't tried it myself, but it is at Tools|Options|Library|Appearance

[quote="TIV73"]Everything is great, until somebody needs more than 5 custom tags.[/quote]

Or somebody wants a numeric field; ie one which doesn't sort like

1
11
2
3
etc

Some custom date fields would be great also.

I agree with that concept. All I and anyone else really cares about is that there we have a field to the put data we want to into. I will have to look into the CustomX stuff - if it can be renamed so to reflect the contents then that is a perfect solution. While "find Custom1=x" works, "find Artist=x" is much better.

How about giving the user more control over what custom data he wants to add instead of adding more fields for specific purposes? Right now we are talking about fields for the opus number, orchestra or soloist. Don't get me wrong, by any means, add those tags! Having more fields to store data is never a bad thing.

Now, Red Maw is a friend of classical music, so he needs a field for the opus number. I use a field to tag songs that are duplicates, one guy I know wants to know if a song contains vocals and, if so, who is the lead vocalist. Some people might care about who did the music arrangement, what catalog number an album has, if they ripped it from CD or downloaded it, how much they paid for it, etc.. What I'm saying is that it will never be possible to satisfy all potential use cases, and the more the more specific new tags get, the less usefull they will be for the broad userbase.

The CustomX tags are an ideal solution for this issue. They allow a user to save exactly what data he wants, and I believe I somewhere saw an option to change the label of the fields. Everything is great, until somebody needs more than 5 custom tags.
So why not give the users more custom fields? Add a new page to the properties dialog and fill it with generic tags. That way users are much less likely to hit a point where they have more data than they have empty fields available. Maybe add a shortcut to the option to change the display names of the fields, to make it easier for the user to customise them.

Alternatively, and this is me cherry picking, why not let users create new tags on the fly? Something like how album art is currently handled, just for text instead of images. I mean, album art already already has a description field, so I could in theory just create a 1x1 dummy image, add that to a track and then fill the description with whatever I need. This is really more a hack than a solution and probably creates more problems in the long run than it solves, but you get the idea.

Admittedly, the second idea would be a tall order to implement since there are quite a few technical, ux, etc. considerations about it. I figured I'd throw out the idea anyway, so we can at least talk about it.

[quote="jiri"]re. new metadata fields particularly for classical music - would be interested in more details, i.e. which fields are the most important for you, how do you usually populate them, etc. There's definitely quite a lot we could improve for classical music.
Jiri[/quote]

For me the most important information about "classical" works and what I mainly use to filter and query are:

- Composer
- Conductor
- Orchestra/group
- Soloist
- Opus Number

BMV and K/KV numbers are also useful in for some works but I am not sure it would be worth making a specific field for them.

The first two are existing fields, and for orchestra/group i tend to use the artist field but there are not any really good substitutes for the last two. Using unused fields like album artist and lyricists works well enough but it doesn't feel good, if you know what I mean.

@TIV73, @jiri,

I have long since given up reducing the size of my MM window so I completely missed how it how it changes when the window is reduced.

Regarding the now playing list, I would agree not many people would want all that information in it so maybe a custom view as suggested is the best way to go. I experimented with adding those fields to the sidebar but it can be bit hard to read as the sidebar isn't very wide (which is good for a sidebar). The fields I like to have visible in the now playing list are title, artist, album, and album artist. Off screen, but available via horizontal scroll, I have length, rating, bitrate, playcount, last played, and path.

Also apologies for being so late to reply to the thread. I wanted to at least mention the classical field stuff but things got busy and I kept forgetting to get around to it.

Sure, forum feedback is important in order to know what our users like! ;-)

Jiri

Great, thanks, much pleased.

Sorry to keep banging on about it, but the status wasn't clear until now.

[quote="jiri"]
3. It [the missing A&D view] isn't implemented yet, mainly because it isn't that easy to implement perfectly and also we weren't sure how much needed this view will be (considering all the new features of MM5). Anyway, I'll review this and try to get it to the 5.0 release.[/quote]

[quote="jiri"]Note though that we didn't remove it [the missing A&D view], it's just that it wasn't implemented yet - there were other things with higher priorities. We plan to add it as soon as possible in order to support at least the same feature set as in MM4 (and probably quite some more).[/quote]

Thanks for a detailed report. I see that it's mostly about missing A&D view. Note though that we didn't remove it, it's just that it wasn't implemented yet - there were other things with higher priorities. We plan to add it as soon as possible in order to support at least the same feature set as in MM4 (and probably quite some more).

Jiri

[quote="jiri"]We definitely don't want to make MM5 dumbed down, but it should be easier to use than MM4, even for an average user. So, in case you miss anything anywhere, we'd love to hear about it.[/quote]

[quote="dtsig"] one place it is dumbing down is the grid. To me the grid view is the most important. All the data All the time :)[/quote]

I think that the main thing that MM5 is "missing" is grid facilities, especially for those of us who are album-focused.

This MM4 grid facility (nearly) has it all IMO

[img]https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/104861308/MM5-f.png[/img]

1. an immersive (good size thumb) album-focused grid
2. custom filters with re sizable lists. I can scan any list to see what is in the grid, and can easily zero the grid into a subset
3. facility to sort and segment the grid into groups .... the one thing where the MM4 facility disappoints is that there is no way to turn sorting|grouping off, and the sort|grouping options are not customisable (ie. cannot add to, or change the sorting|grouping attributes offered) ... the only way that it worked well for me is that I have all my tracks rated to 0, so the Rating column gave me an ungrouped display. .... this one thing that I had hoped MM5 would improve upon, ie. grouping on|off, and facility to customise those options ... instead the whole facility got removed ... disappointed

Those are the facilities I want when browsing the albums in my collection, or one of my custom indices.

In MM5 I just get this ... ie. no browsable list (other than the album list in the Media Tree). ... no sorting and no grouping either

[img]https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/104861308/MM5-b.png[/img]

If I try to use the Media Tree to achieve something similar ... say browse genres in the custom filer, I get this ... ie lots of clicking ... I am not sure what I was going to get to see due to a bug, but it was too much clicking anyway

[img]https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/104861308/MM5-c.png[/img]

The new filter thing good for searching, and was a worthwhile addition as goes across all displays, but is too clunky for browsing.

[img]https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/104861308/MM5-d.png[/img]

MM5 is a backwards step for album-focused people IMO

* the album grid is dumbed-down, with no sorting, no grouping nor filtering

* no Show Art & Details display ... ie. an album-focused grid display, but an all-in-one where I can also *browse* the albums, with track details, and with a hotspot (the "summary" cell) where I can select the album as a group for setting whole album Properties, or for drag and drop

The nice new inline album display does some of this, but it isn't a browse ... ie. I need to click on each album, one at a time, to see the album tracks, so I identify what I am browsing for

[img]https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/104861308/MM5-e.png[/img]

This was better

[img]https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/104861308/MM5-f.png[/img]

[quote="jiri"]The Now Playing view supports multiple layouts and so this one could be easily added. I'm not sure for how many users this would be useful, so probably rather than an included layout, an Addon for this would be better.[/quote]

I like the new view, but I can see why people would want a regular list view, so I wrote a small addon to bring the listview back to the now playing node - [url=https://github.com/mmuffins/mediamonkey-nowplayingdetails/releases]github[/url]

[quote="jiri"]I consider the filtering to be superior. After all, I can type 'ab' and then go through the results just like in the example you mentioned, can't I? I'd certainly like to make all users happy, but I'm not keen on adding a new switch between these two behaviors. So maybe an Addon for those who prefer the way MM4 worked would help?[/quote]
Makes me sad ... i am sure the 'filtering' is superior .. if i wanted to filter. <sigh>