sachinwfs's dashboard

I'm looking into switching to Songbird from MediaMonkey, but the main thing from stopping me is the limited (by comparison) support for metadata.

Though parts of this issue have been addressed in other posts, I thought it would be helpful to summarize some of the ways that I use MediaMonkey's advanced metadata support to manage my music:

• Mood: much of my music has mood data attached to it (ID3v2.4), but I cannot search or filter by mood in Songbird.


• Multiple genres: this is something touched on in other posts, but Songbird should properly support multiple genres. Currently, the two most common ways to have multiple genres are: a) multiple genre frames in ID3 (or equivalent in other media formats) or b) a delimted list in one genre frame. Songbird should support both by separating them out and listing them as individual genres rather than combining them all and treating them as one genre.


• Support for custom tags: MediaMonkey has some limited support for parsing, searching, and filtering by custom tags. It would be great to have something similar in Songbird. More specifically, it allows for custom descriptors within the comment tag in ID3. (By default the comment frame is actually called "COMM:description".) These are "COMM:songs-db_custom1", "COMM:songs-db_custom2", "COMM:songs-db_custom3", and "COMM:songs-db_occasion". Now, the specific meaning of each field might not matter, but I think that Songbird should at the very least treat those fields as extensions of the comment field and allow us to search them.

Just in case anyone was wondering how I even have time to tag my media so thoroughly, I use MusicBrainz Picard with the Last.fm Plus plugin.

Sachin

[1] A helpful catalog of multiformat metadata tags can be found at MusicBrainz.