Good discussion - all the above makes sense.
I agree with Rusty, in that HIDING errors is bad. But MMW & MMA need to be consistent between them. Or, if anything, differences shown in the *editing* tool (MMW), but NOT in the *playback* tool (MMA) (as nohitter151 suggests).
As for displaying, an issue that can happen: given a few "close" genres, say Rock/Hard, Rock/Soft, etc, if the sorting is purely character/numerical, then case variants will produce something like the following, making it harder to spot the problems:
ROCK/HARD
ROCK/SOFT
ROck/Hard
ROck/Soft
Rock/Hard
Rock/Soft
Tossing out a few ideas off the top of my head:
- let the user choose whether to treat a given field as case-sensitive or not?
This would be a bit of a coding effort, even for 1 field, as it affects sorting, querying, display, playlists, tooling, etc, etc.
But code is free on the Forums, right?
(ahem)
- do BOTH? Make them BEHAVE as if the same, but SHOW the user that both exist.
This is similar to nohitter151's idea in some ways, ie MMA=behave the same, MMW=show differences,
and in line with what dtsig is suggesting for MMW: SORT them so that they show up together, but still preserve the distinction.
Maybe some highlighting here could help (ie if multiple items have the same value ignoring case, show them all, but highlight the field(s) in question)
Tooling could also help here: for each entry, see how many matches there are for it both case-sensitive and insensitive - if they differ, highlight the item (I wouldn't be surprised if someone has already done this - trixmoto?)
One more suggestion: can I please have a way to define a genre hierarchy?
That way, I could create a "Rock/Hard" parent, and put the variants below it, but define all my queries/playlists using the parent (unless I *really* only want Rock/Hard/Tribal/from-some-small-CarribbeanIslandThatBeginsWith-"Saint")
(yes, this is my evil, subversive plot to squash 561 genres in my library into a few simple categories for my poor feeble brain to handle while playing on my phone - like Rock, Jazz, Classical, New Age, maybe Vocal/Acapella)