Graham Snyder's dashboard

Well, it looks like the worst of the problems have been solved :)

I think, though, in the case of reorganizing files which are already in the songbird library folder, the danger still requires more emphasis, along the lines of "Songbird is about to permanently rename and reorganise the files in this folder. Do not proceed unless the music in this folder is perfectly tagged and does not include any compilations, or your file structure will be irreversibly mangled".

You know, that sort of thing.

What I'm getting at is that warning bar in the manage files dialogue warns only that files will be irreversably "reorganised" - it doesn't mention that that reorganisation is based on tags and hence if there's anything amiss with your tagging or anything else unusual about your files, they are likely to become extremely disorganised. Perhaps this information could be included in warning dialogue when you press ok, if there isn't one already. – Graham Snyder, on October 29, 2009 22:32

Absolutely right... It's unbelieveable that this bug, among others, was raised 4 months ago to address the problem, and all that has happened on the bug page is a discussion on wording. And the target milestone is apparently "future" rather than "4 months ago"... – Graham Snyder, on October 29, 2009 20:33

The checkbox is checked; as to system changes, to be honest, it's difficult to say, because I changed my entire system recently - I got a new laptop (Vista 64) and I'm not entirely certain whether it ever worked on this system, though I think it did before 1.2. I'll boot up my old one (XP SP3) and check whether watch folders work with SB 1.2. At any rate there's definitely a bug here somewhere...

@Michael: Yes, both nice, but id3 renamer is streets ahead of them in terms of functionality. The only feature which I really miss from id3 renamer is a preview - it just means you have to be careful, and make sure you don't use your new tags to rename the file until you've checked them over. – Graham Snyder, on July 02, 2009 18:34

The issue of blame put to one side for a minute, there is no question that there should be an option to ignore any file with missing tag fields.This is so patently obvious that I can't believe it doesn't already exist. Angry Customer has every right to be angry about this - if the option isn't there, then by no means should it just rearrange everything with missing tags anyway by default. I can't see that anyone would ever want every file missing the appropriate tags filed under "unknown artist" or "unknown album", especially when they've already meticulously organised those files without using tags as seems to be the case for AC.

Angry Customer, if you manage to get your file structure back using a system, restore, you may well be able to use your old file structure to efficiently tag the files using the program "id3 renamer". It's what I use to organise my music and will continue to use until this songbird feature is sufficiently functional. id3 renamer has a tag-from-filename feature which works very well, with one caveat - you need to learn to use regular expressions. It's also advisable to do it folder-by-folder, because if there's any files which don't match the pattern it can bork the tags up quite a lot.
Once you've got all your files tagged properly, songbird should be able to keep them organised for you. Or you can just do it manually using id3 renamer.

Leading zeroes are not an itunes convention, really. They're commonly used to make sure files are ordered correctly when sorted by name in a file manager, and therefore a part of most sensible naming conventions. (Note: by no means do I endorse the itunes naming convention, just leading zeroes in general). – Graham Snyder, on July 01, 2009 22:25

Thanks Laura,
I'd just like to clarify a couple of things, though it won't affect your response as regards functionality. I'll try to be a bit more concise this time!

I have:

1. a largely well-organised music library which I intend to keep that way, preferably using songbird's automatic organisation, so that I no longer have to manually rename and organise new music I add. Sadly this is not possible at the moment because songbird's file naming/struction scheme options are too limiting to implement my current, preferred structure

2. a much smaller, separate folder full of poorly tagged odds and ends. I don't want songbird's auto-organisation, when I come to use it, to touch this folder under any circumstances; the poor tagging would result in a horrific mess or mismatched artist names and missing tags if it tried to organise it automagically.

Hence I would like
1. more comprehensive file-structure scheme options
2. to be able to choose folder(s) to be ignored when the auto-organisation is applied.

Are either of these likely to be implemented, in any time frame? In the mean time I'm quite happy to carry on organising my music manually, as I don't want songbird to remove all the years from my album-folder names.

Thank you for implementing this feature! By and measure it is far and away a better implementation than itunes's. And it's so tantalisingly close to being perfect it's excruciating. Let me explain what I mean:

This is my (very carefully and painstakingly organised) music structure, which by no means will I disrupt:

[...]\Music\Artist\(Year) Album\Artist - Track - Title

The album folder title is deliberately prefixed with the (Year) so that they appear chronologically when sorted by name. With the current system there is no option for more than one tag in a folder field, and for that matter, no option for anything other than tags and dashes in the track name template, so it's impossible to apply my chosen file structure without adding addition unnecessary folder levels, and also impossible to apply any file name which features extra characters, such as the common practise of putting brackets round the track.
I suggest a small change (I say small; it could actually need a fair bit of code) to the interface, as follows:
At the moment, each tag is selectable from a dropdown menu. Add a "Custom" option to all these menus so that when you select it, a text box appears below the relevant field, into which you can put a pattern for the field, along the lines of "(%Year) %Album", or some such, like in programs such as id3 renamer (which is what I currently use to deal with organising my music). This would allow for more complicated file structures without compromising the simplicity of the interface for the average user - only for power users who know what they're doing.

I have one other question relating to this function:
I haven't (daren't) use it yet, but as I understand it, *all* music in my library will be moved or copied to the chosen music folder and the selected file structure applied. On my system I have one folder of well organised music and another full of poorly organised stuff that I haven't got around to sorting out or can't be bothered to sort it out. I'd like a way to be able to listen to music in this folder without songbird making any changes to the track locations or names, even if file organisation is turned on (if it did try to apply the file structure it would probably be a disaster as many tracks in this folder are incorrectly or inconsistently tagged, or are missing tags). Is this currently possible?

Oh, and one more thing: this feature remains completely useless to anyone with compilation albums until that (rather more important) feature is implemented. Apparently songbird HQ disagree with this priorities-wise; go figure.

*phew* that reply turned out a lot longer that I originally intended. I hope somebody has the perseverance to read it.

I never raised it, I didn't get round to registering a bugzilla account. Is it still there?