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Automatically organizing music library
Can Songbird copy my music into a music library file and then automatically organize my music library the way Itunes does? (By keeping the artist folders organized by album, etc.) For example, if I have music or other audio files on my computer that I want to put into Songbird, is there a way for it to automatically copy it into a music library folder and then organize it after I drag it into Songbird?
I’m hoping I can be convinced to convert to Songbird!
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To all:
There is a nice way to get your compilations not scattered around.
- Use the AlbumArtist tag:
---- For compilations, set this tag to one single value, "Compilation", or 'Various Artists" for instance
---- For other tracks, copy the Artist tag into the AlbumArtist tag (use the Tagger extension to do that, it's very powerful. http://addons.songbirdnest.com/addon/... )
- Now all your tracks should have an AlbumArtist
- Update the structure of the Manage Music in the Options: set it to 'AlbumArtist\Album' instead of the default 'Artist\Album"
- Songbird will move all your files to a new structure, with all compilation tracks in a single "Compilation' folder, and all other tracks sorted by Artist.
I'm sure the result will be similar to what you are looking for.
Note that you can also add the field AlbumArtist to the 3-selector pane, as a selector, and also as a displayed column in the list of tracks (by right-clicking on the header rows of both the list and the selector pane)
3 people think
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1. Compilations
I may have this completely the wrong way, but I don't understand what the problem with compilations is. I have many albums that are compilations. I put 'Various' in the album artist field, and then the album name, so they are all neatly organised by Songbird in a 'Various' folder (I personally use the year as a subfolder, and then the album title as a further subfolder). In fact, I think Songbird has a clear advantage here, because many other programmes do not use an 'album artist' field.
2. Ignored folders
I am running two Songbird profiles, so that I can have different options enabled for different music collections. This means that not all of my music is available under a single profile, but this is fine for my purposes.
3 people think
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ummmmm, Laura..... this is different than 'watch folders'.... this is one of the main reasons i still use iTunes. I am anal about organizing my music, and once Songbird can do that, I will uninstall iTunes.
Its kinda a mix of these two bugs...
http://bugzilla.songbirdnest.com/show...
http://bugzilla.songbirdnest.com/show...
I’m unsure
3 people think
this is one of the best points
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We'll if you haven't noticed by the recent discussion already, Songbird 1.2 is out! And the ability to automatically organize your library files in all its glory is in there, begging for you to play with it!
So what are you waiting for!? Go Get Songbird!
I’m excited
The company and 1 other person think
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Good News! It looks like this feature is going to be implemented in the 'Isan' Release (April '09)...
Along with some other big features (CD Rip, CD Burn, Metadata Cleanup) the Songbird team is planning; File Organization is looking positive right now ;)
I’m thankful
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Inappropriate?ummmmm, Laura..... this is different than 'watch folders'.... this is one of the main reasons i still use iTunes. I am anal about organizing my music, and once Songbird can do that, I will uninstall iTunes.
Its kinda a mix of these two bugs...
http://bugzilla.songbirdnest.com/show...
http://bugzilla.songbirdnest.com/show...
I’m unsure
3 people think
this is one of the best points
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Inappropriate?I'm also fairly anal about organisation, so I would love it if Songbird could neaten up my Music folder.
I’m waiting for this feature
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Inappropriate?yeah I agree! I love how itunes makes sre that my music stays organized in one place and I don't think I can switch to Songbird if it doesn't do the same
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Inappropriate?this is truly a wonderful function of iTunes... it makes finding and sharing music so much easier... iTunes is the last holdout keeping me from running linux on all my machines... hell i even dual boot my ipod...
i can't see that this would be terribly hard to implement... read the ID3 tags, copy the file into a structured system based on the tags...
I’m down to 1 non-linux machine... going for 0.
1 person thinks
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Inappropriate?"this is truly a wonderful function of iTunes... it makes finding and sharing music so much easier... iTunes is the last holdout keeping me from running linux on all my machines..."
That is soo true for me too! iTunes is the only reason I still use my windows partition, I use nothing else on Windows except iTunes (to organize my music) and on Linux I use Songbird and everything else.
I would like to see a proper bug for this, or have one of the current bugs be updated to have implementation in a future release, and not just 'Future'.
I’m waiting...
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so a little songbird will kill microsoft -
Inappropriate?So is this just a matter of organizing it so that each artist has a folder?
I'm soooo sick of iTunes, but my music is already organized by iTunes, so when I switch I'd like to keep it that way. It would be a pain to manually put albums in the right folder each time I add them to Songbird?
2 people think
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not quite, itunes organize it by the mask [artist]/[album]/[song title] if the song is not part of compilation. If it is, the path is [compilations]/[album name]/something (don't remember now).
The best thing should be give to user possibility to define their masks for organizing library. For example i would prefer [artist] - [album]/[track] [song title] mask for my collection :D -
I agree, i would like to be able to do artist, then album release date. so i can go by artists first then how in chronological order.
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Inappropriate?Bug 11879 is the main bug for this issue, but I would like it to receive a 'Target milestone'! Like for Hendrix or Isan...
So lets try to rally this one up in the feature request list!!
I’m loving community involvement to improve Songbird!
2 people think
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Inappropriate?Installed Songbird 1.0 last night, only to find that it does't have one of iTunes best features. Please implement this asap!
I’m frustrated
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Inappropriate?Amarok does this for me on Linux -- organises my music files in a predictable hierarchy. I kind of like that Songbird *doesn't* do this at the moment, as I use the same library with Songbird (just to check it out as it develops) while using Amarok as my main player. I'm not sure what would happen if I had two players trying to keep me organised at the same time. Would be good if, like iTunes, Songbird could offer the *option* of keeping folders organised.
I’m good, thanks.
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Of course. This will definitely be an option, So many people have different ways of managing their music.
So the main ways of managing would be:
1) Adding files/Drag and Drop to Library and keeping those files in that same location (Default, right now)
2) Watch Folders (In Next Release, and probably what you would like best)
3) Automatically organizing by metadata (For people that would like Songbird as their default media player and/or organization purposes) -
Inappropriate?The options in iTunes are called:
‘Keep iTunes Music folder organised’
and
‘Copy files to iTunes Music folder when adding to library’
This is why I haven't ditched iTunes yet completely
I’m just puttin’ that out there
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yep, thank you. these are the two options I would like to see in Songbird! Go ahead and add that to the bug - http://bugzilla.songbirdnest.com/show...
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Inappropriate?What about duplicate detection?
I have a lot of problems tracking down my newly purchased music, and syncing it between two machines.
I might buy music on my laptop or my desktop, and I always want to make sure I have it backed up on my desktop.
Could be useful, and a big step above iTunes, because iTunes doesn't allow you to monitor a specific folder for new files to add to the library.2 Comments Add a comment
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There's already an add-on for that... http://addons.songbirdnest.com/addon/216
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exorcist has problems. duplicated titles instead of erasing them. also messed up mediaflow. had to delete library and reimport.also delete and reinstall mediaflw
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Inappropriate?I used to use a separate utility for this: Tag & Rename on Windows. While I still keep this around, it is really nice to have iTunes handle it for me (as well as handling my iPod and podcast subscriptions). I really like Songbird and hope it adds these features so I can ditch iTunes.
I’m wishing for more
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Inappropriate?i switch to songbird because i hate that itunes feature, please do this feature optional, i dont want my music duplicated or organized, when i want to find a song i do it from songbird or from spotlight, id like to have all my music "not organized" i like it to be in a single folder.
I’m i dont like this feature
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You can turn that feature off in iTunes.
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You can turn that feature off in iTunes.
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I hear you Dude, If the classic Watched folder gets taken off and the iTunes organizing system goes in instead of i will become sad. But it would be good to have this system as an option along with Watched Folder as another option.
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Inappropriate?If this feature is available in Songbird, I'll immediately switch to it. I <3>s holding me back, is this one. Hope to see it as part of the top priority for the coming or next release.
I’m anxiously waiting for this feature!
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Inappropriate?I agree with all of the above. For now, I'm just going to add music using iTunes and have Songbird check my iTunes library for updates.
I’m excited to witness the glorious evolution of Songbird
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Inappropriate?Just a suggestion -- it looks like it's not going into Hendrix, but I really don't think it would be a very complicated extension. Me, I hate it when iTunes does this, it's always the first thing I disabled back when I used iTunes.
Still, it really should be quite straightforward to write as long as you don't need to go through all the overhead of in-house development.1 Comment Add a comment
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Thanks for the reply pvh!
So we need someone that knows how to make that happen as an extension! -
Inappropriate?I'm studying the extension mechanism of Songbird, and I will try make a extension to do this important feature3 Comments Add a comment
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How's the extension going? Any progress to report?
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How's the extension going? Any progress to report?
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Ya, any luck on if you'll be able to work on this?
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Inappropriate?Fantastic. Feel free to send emails to the sb-dev mailing list with your questions or to hop into our IRC channel. We'll be glad to help you get set in the right direction.
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Inappropriate?I 2nd this...or possibly 27th it...it's the only thing holding me back from a smooth itunes -> songbird transition, since i have an external hard drive.
I’m pretty excited to use songbird full time...sans this problem.
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Inappropriate?same here. implement folder organisation and songbird will be the one. :)
I’m excited
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Inappropriate?I really think it should be an option. For the moment there are more people interested into having this features activated, but some don't like it. So everybody should be respected for its tastes.
The better solution would be a flexible structure, something that could be customized in the way of WordPress's permalink structure for example.
Personally, I'm really looking forward using that feature, and it would be my definiive farewell to iTunes !
I’m confident
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i agree with you, i am one of whose who dislike this feature, i dont want my music duplicated and recompressed, and i like to find it where i left it. but a lot of people want it so them can't not be listened too
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Inappropriate?"i dont want my music duplicated and recompressed"
I don't think anyone wants music recompressed. No program I'm aware of does this. I just don't want to sit there manually making folders for albums or artists or both and keeping that all organized. If I'm going to tag the songs with album and artist information I don't want to have to go do that all over again with folders or file names. The music app should do that automatically.
Then if I am looking for a file I don't have to worry about it being amongst random files scattered across my drive nor did I have to do twice the work and both tag the music's ID3 *and* file name *and* folder organization.
It's already been organized in my Songbird library. I shouldn't have to open Songbird to see that organization. I should be able to just browse to my "Music" folder with any app and see that organization was automatically maintained without any mucking around on my part.
2 people think
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Inappropriate?Yes. Everybody has there only preferences on how to store there music. Personally, when you have upwards of 80 Gigs of music, and you are also wanting to share that music with friends and family on a server, for easy access and find-ability... It is almost necessary for your music files to be highly organized in an Artist-Album-Track format..
And when you edit your metadata and it Automatically re-organizes it for you as in iTunes, its almost impossible to just switch media players without that function.
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Inappropriate?I must say that I am missing this feature too. As a Linux user I really miss iTunes, but not enough to use OSX. Songbird is coming along as a great application without many of those restrictions found in iTunes. I have been struggling with finding a music player that fits my needs, and currently it stands between Songbird and Banshee. Songbird has all I want, except for organizing the music library and marking files as a compilation. Banshee has the ability to manage my music library, but lacks many of those features that Songbird has :(
I’m unsure
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Inappropriate?I was hoping as well for some sort of perhaps 'consolidate library' feature
I’m wanting
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Inappropriate?*signed*
This is the only reason I haven't switched from iTunes yet. I have enough music that I have to store it all on an external HDD (since I only have a 60GB on my laptop). Thus, I want all of my music I buy to go to the external when it's added to the library. If this feature was added in, and preferably with the same organizing pattern as iTunes or with the option of doing so, then I'd be sold. Great software otherwise!
I’m hopeful
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Inappropriate?Although I hated this feature in iTunes at first, I'm now dependent on it.
I don't really care how exactly Songbird does the organizing as long as it's able to do the entire folder.
This is the last thing holding me back from uninstalling iTunes
I’m happy that this is in the top 5, patiently waiting
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Inappropriate?This is the main reason I ever began using iTunes, and it remains my last link to it. A customizable method of organizging (I would prefer year released to come before album name, for example) would be fantastic in setting this above the competition for all of us who have just a little bit too much music for a human to handle :)
I hope this comes soon.
I’m waiting.
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Inappropriate?I hate iTunes and was happy to exorcise it despite the lack of this critical component in Songbird. At the same time, I'm trying to rebuild my library on a network share instead of a local partition, and appear to be stuck with rebuilding from scratch.
My entire music library is in utter disarray and consists primarily of dead links now, and it will remain in that condition while I await proper filesystem management. Neither reinstalling iTunes no tackling this problem by hand is worth my time or effort, and the latter may well be simply infeasible anyway.
I’m waiting.
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I'm not sure if you have this problem or not. But you could have "Consolidated" your library through iTunes(moving your collection into a single folder). Then moved your files to the network drive. Then changed the 'iTunes Music Library.xml' file to reflect the new change in file systems. (i.e. 'C:\Users\USER\Music\iTunes\iTunes Music' TO 'E:\Music' or whatever your new location is) Then use the iTunes Importer to import your library. Not sure if you needed help, just wondering :)
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Yeah, my iTunes library file was very out of date and missing half my collection, but even so, I did try that. When I imported the library, everything still pointed to the old location. But even if it had worked, it would only have done half the job, and the old half at that (about which I don't care quite as much anyway).
I find it extremely odd that there is no way to just edit the songbird library directly. The database is SQLite, but wrapped in something nonstandard, and through the use of extensions I'm able to /see/ paths for items, but still cannot edit them. It seems very odd that Songbird, while having no filesystem /management/ capabilities, further insists on breaking and forcing users to start over with any data they ever want to move. -
Inappropriate?agree with everyone: a fully customizable *option* to turn on organization based on metadata (albums above all) would wipe itunes off the market!
Can't wait to see it..
I’m excited to see songbird be Better than ITunes in every respect
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Inappropriate?To improve on itunes, you should be able to customize it, maybe have it
music/<genre>/<artist>-<songname>.mp3
or
music/<artist>/<album>/<songname>.mp3
etc. etc.
This is a really important feature to me.</songname></album></artist></songname></artist></genre> -
Inappropriate?this one feature is what's keeping that draconian, vile itunes installed on my pc. my large music collection makes this add-on a must. please make this available, either by add-on or built in.
I’m hopeful
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hey don't dis draconians (dragons) by associating them with itunes. :)
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Inappropriate?I'm using winamp, itunes, and songbird right now. There are some reasons but this is the main one. Fix this and the Creative Zen vision M problems and I'm all yours.
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Inappropriate?Good News! It looks like this feature is going to be implemented in the 'Isan' Release (April '09)...
Along with some other big features (CD Rip, CD Burn, Metadata Cleanup) the Songbird team is planning; File Organization is looking positive right now ;)
I’m thankful
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Glad to hear it. Maybe then I can stop using Winamp to mimmick iTunes' behavior/export formats to maintain Songbird's library.
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and by April, I mean May.... sorry..
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I just installed the beta and really like your implementation. But..(and you just knew there was a "but" coming), there is one tiny thing missing...compilations. Would it be too difficult to add that for those mp3s/albums that need it? In itunes, for example, there is a check box within the Tag info box that enables it to be a compilation. This forces the directory structure to "automatically" go from /Artist/Album, to /Compilation/Album. The reason this is necessary is because 1) if the artist already has an existing folder 2) it would put the album under multiple artists and not keep the album together. It's kind of like an exception to the rule. These are albums such as soundtracks or those compilation cds bought online/phone/given away, etc.... Or, would that be asking too much for this release? I may have other comments after playing around with it, but this was the first thing that immediately caught my eye. Is there somewhere else I should be going to file this kind of thing, or is there a better place such as within the development area?
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Inappropriate?Will the automatic organization have any degree of customization? I would like to be able to choose something other than artist/album/track, plus I'd like to change the naming scheme (maybe have the artist name in the file too, and not the track number)5 Comments Add a comment
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I second this sentiment and would in fact like to have very robust customizeability...I like having my music sorted at the top level by genre rather than artist in case I actually need to look through the music directly on the filesystem, and on Winamp I am able to do so.
Some caution is advisable though, even if only simple path constructions are supported. A small number of predefined layouts should be not only offered but *recommended*. It is very easy to define a layout that sounds very good but will present a large number of conflicts. I like keeping things simple and concise, and in Winamp did the following:
(if album is defined) /Albums/<album>/<track> - <title>.ext
(otherwise) /Genres/<genre>/<artist>/<title>.ext
This could have worked fine, but not really like I wanted.
My album collection comes from an age when the bundling of songs into an album was far more meaningful than marketing economics, which is why I wanted them handled separately. But, because I had a huge number of singles with album information, had no way to identify *complete* albums, didn't want to remove album information on incomplete albums, and only wanted complete albums in the /Albums directory, I simplified it to:
(for all files) /<genre>/<artist>/<title>.ext
and the result was about .1% of my library had file path conflicts, which might seem surprising for a moment since you wouldn't think that an artist would have two songs by the same name...but he could have two different recordings of the same song in separate albums.
I also hate throwing extra information in fields where it doesn't really belong, like the fact that a recording is live in the title, or disc number in the album name. It's really a shame that ID3 tags weren't designed in a more extensible manner, but they weren't so we're stuck, at least in relation to our software-agnostic libraries. When it comes to supporting the Songbird library, however, it would be awfully nice if we could arbitrarily define our own metadata fields or apply tags, and then use the extra information to help build the filesystem layout. Without such, our options for defining useful/functional layouts that won't have path conflicts are rather limited.
Ultimately, however, simply being able to pass off filesystem handling and media consolidation to any kind of reliable automated process is the fundamental and most important matter.</title></artist></genre></title></artist></genre></title></album> -
@ Grazfather and HonoredMule
It is still in the planning/idea stage, so I can't say how much customization there will be.. But if you head over to the Release page: http://wiki.songbirdnest.com/Releases...
You can see it says "user should be able to customize how files are organized (e.g. folder naming convention, file naming convention, etc.)"
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Yeah, I had noticed that earlier, but forgot. Thanks.
You can chalk up my comment as a request for extensive customizeability and tight integration with extended/additional metadata--but it's a "would be nice" rather than a "must have." -
That's excellent!
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I don't use iTunes, but this feature is a 'must have' for me, too. Currently, my player/library organizer of choice is Media Monkey. The software supports a very robust organization scheme based on metadata that allows you perform conditionals on tag contents and mask tags when organizing files.
For example, I keep all compilation albums in a 'Various Artists' folder. The organization mask performs a conditional on the <albumartist> tag accordingly: $if(<albumartist>=Various Artists,[true condition],[false condition]). Further, I have the rest of my collection first subcategorized into three-character folders based on the artist name (ABC\... DEF\... etc). The masking portion takes care of it as such: ...\<artist:3>\<artist>\.
It took a little work to refine, but now my collection organization is pristine and all new tracks (assuming correct metadata) tuck away into the file structure perfectly. Media Monkey doesn't perform this automatically, but a simple key command triggers the dialog box.</artist></artist:3></albumartist></albumartist> -
Inappropriate?Songbird is becoming much more better than ITunes, frustrating ITunes, crazy Library, crazy things happen, you loose your music somewhere else, and many many more.
PLEASE DO IT! i would like to help!!!
I’m excited
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Inappropriate?At this point, I would like any kind of folder organziation just to get rid of iTunes. Lets get our feet in the door before we start making changes. Who knows If you get the organize my music folder option in, an addon will pop up to customize certain things. The more stuff demanded of this feature the longer it will take to be implemented. Lets just get there, and when we are all uninstalling itunes (oh glorious day that will be) then we can worry about modifying how it organizes our sounds. I have a netbook and I use it as an mp3 player on the go, I have my desktops music folder organized but i had to copy my music from my ipod onto my netbook so now i have all these silly folders the way the ipod has them organized. Its a horrid mess, Id like to click on this feature and Voila! Nice a neat in the my music folder.
I’m am grateful for any version of this feature in the near future
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Inappropriate?this is not only the reason im not using songbird yet, its the reason im stuck to fucking windows!!!
there is no good itunes replacement yet....sadly
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Inappropriate?I use musicBrainz Picard for that. It can tag and automaticly sort music after pre defined rules
I don't need this
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I second that (even if it is not the musicBrainz software I use.)
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Inappropriate?Let you know that i ́m leaving my music there until i find out that you implemented this and use it.
I have a veeeery large collection, and very crazy one. I ́m frightened of the results so i ́ll keep a back up.
I’m silly
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Inappropriate?some extra stuff for this idea, please read it worth the time since it affekts everyone.
http://getsatisfaction.com/songbird/t...
I’m thankful
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Inappropriate?consolidation consolidation consolidation I will drop Itunes as soon as this is possible
I’m confused
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Inappropriate?I have made a python script for linux users which will consolidate / organise one's songbird (1.1.1) library much like iTunes does. There is also workaround support for soundtracks and compilations.
http://code.google.com/p/jerome/1 Comment Add a comment
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nice script- i'll try it out later. i especially like how you do support for compilations and soundtracks. i do have one complaint- I was reading the page on your google code site, and now i have the 99 red balloons song stuck in my head.
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Inappropriate?I don't use iTunes so I don't know how it works. With this idea, are all of the files visible at the same time? They just show up in a certain order? Or do just the artists show up and you double click and then you get that artists albums and you double click and so on? That is what I would prefer, as an option at least.1 Comment Add a comment
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This is not related to this particular thread. But Songbird does have a filter pane view option where 3 options are available: Genre, Artist and Album. Picking a choice of these options from right to left will narrow down the results in the next filter pane as well as songs in the main list view.
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Inappropriate?I posted in another thread on this topic about JuK for linux and its nice customisation features for file organisation and renaming. I don't know how far development has got with this but today I finally dusted off my kubuntu install and took a couple of screenshots to show what I mean:
This is the File Renaming scheme dialogue. Moving the fields up and down the list changes their position in the file name:
This one is the dialogue you get when you press the options button on any of the fields in the other pic. It allows you to place text before and after the field:
I’m hopfully not too late in posting this
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Amorak.
Too much people like this software because the excelent customize (like customize the separator). -
Amorak.
Too much people like this software because the excelent customize (like customize the separator). -
Inappropriate?The description of the functionality by Graham Snyder is exactly what I want.
I’m thankful
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Inappropriate?this feature was the only thing that kept me using wmp 11. Even though I've left wmp. I'll definitely appreciate it. Kudows to songbird -
Inappropriate?I'm really sad that I switched over to Songbird before I realized how important this feature was to me. Now I'm stuck.
I’m sad
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Inappropriate?Download sb 1.2b1 from here:
http://developer.songbirdnest.com/bui...
And I believe Automatic Organisation is in the options dialog.
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Inappropriate?what is taht?. a beta version? unstable or something?1 Comment Add a comment
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it's pretty stable actually :)
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Inappropriate?its quite awesome i tried the beta, but theres still one problem: most of my tracks have a singled track number for example : 1 Muse - Exciter or so and it would be very nice, if songbirds adds a leading zero (e.g. 01 Muse - Exciter)
I’m happy and waiting
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leading zeros aren't needed anymore. In the old days windows sorted songs like this:
10
11
12
1
2
3
...
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thats why the leading zeros were needed. now its not needed anymore and is better without it. -
This comment was removed on 05/26/09.
see the change log -
There's actually a whole world outside Windows, and the last time I checked, Songbird was cross-platform. In fact, there's a world outside graphical file browsers, too.
There are still plenty of cases where leading zeroes would be favorable so that plain and straightforward stringsorts will produce the appropriate order without unnecessary complications.
I'm all for asthetics, but eliminating a few solitary leading zeroes is hardly worth the tradeoff. -
but didnt linux fix that issue lightyears before windows? o_O
and yeah it would still help. if u make it a bugzilla topic link it and ill vote -
If I type "ls" in the terminal, the files are sorted with 10 before 2 and it will probably always be like that. I'm not sure what you men with "linux fix that".. Some specific file manager? Even if they would be sorted right, they won't be aligned properly even in the Windows file manager unless the track numbers have the same width in pixels.
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Inappropriate?I don't know what any of you are talking about. I installed the newest version of Songbird and there is STILL no "automatic organisation" function. do i live in an alternate universe????
I’m weirded out.
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Did you install a 1.3 or a 1.2 version?
1.3 is from here and these builds don't inculde library organisation:
http://developer.songbirdnest.com/bui...
1.2 is from here and they do:
http://developer.songbirdnest.com/bui... -
hey, thanks!
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np :)
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its not in the latest release, it is in the "nightie buildie". But if you didn't figure that our by yourself you should probably not use it yet. It is in BETA it DOESNT WORK fully and might BRAKE your song database. Allthough it only seems to copy files into the specified folder and rename them there, without messing with the original files your should be carefull when using it. Use it on "test songs" (bakcup 100-200 and import those) and report bugs
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Inappropriate?Some bugs/improvements I found, vote if you care ^_^
Bug:
http://bugzilla.songbirdnest.com/show...
Suggestions
http://bugzilla.songbirdnest.com/show...
http://bugzilla.songbirdnest.com/show...
http://bugzilla.songbirdnest.com/show... -
Inappropriate?So, here's a question about this. I just installed a hard drive just for storing my music library, and I want to move all my actual files there. What's the best course of action? If I just set a folder on that drive as the folder for automatic organization, and turned automatic organization on, would it move all of them for me?5 Comments Add a comment
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yes, and it would also keep your original files in case you dont like the result. KEEP IN MIND this is still in development and is not implemented in stable releases. Be carefull not to regret the result. Help to test it with small number of files (100-200) and report any bugs you find so it can be released stable soon.
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i just moved my whole library this way and it worked great!
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One last question: So if I open a new file that's not in my library yet, will it copy it to my library folder?
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hm... im not sure lol
if you configured songbird to add every played file to your library automatically then yes it should -
how would one do that?
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Inappropriate?The other piece of the organization puzzle, in my opinion, is the ability to drag and drop files to outside SB. Currently, the D&D system they implemented does not have the drag and drop object enumerating like a system-generic file list. They should change their implementation. You can read more about these issues here:
http://getsatisfaction.com/songbird/t...
http://getsatisfaction.com/songbird/t...
http://getsatisfaction.com/songbird/t...
Note that exporting a playlist would be practically solved by what I am suggesting.
Songbird team: please give us this.1 Comment Add a comment
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i agree although it doesnt directly concern this topic ^_^
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Inappropriate?We need this option
Able us to change "move files" to "copy files"
"Copy files to Songbird Music folder when adding to library"
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TOTALLY.
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Inappropriate?Some wishes: I want single-disc albums to be named like this:
Album Artist/Year - Album/Track Number - Artist - Title
for example:
Skitsystem/1995 - Profithysteri/02 - Skitsystem - Maktens Murar Rasar.mp3
If disc-number is set (it's a multi-disc album), the track number should be prepended with "Disc Number-" like this:
Various Artists/1995 - Varning För Punk/3-16 - Mob 47 - Dom Ljuger.mp3
Please make this possible. It's ok if it's an advanced "about:config" option as long as it's possible. For maximum flexibility I'm even OK with using some external hook script.1 Comment Add a comment
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Actually, I'd even like to make the Album part "Album (Year)" if the album is a compilation. That's why a hook would be great. It could be a .js file in my Songbird directory, implementing a "make_filename" function.
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Inappropriate?I'm very anxious to stop using Winamp... so far, Songbird is above and beyond Winamp, in my opinion, except in one place... music/file organization.
I cannot believe that this has not yet been implemented. I see that it is in the plans, but I can find no estimates as to when it will be added. Aside from the basic features of any media player software, this seems to me like it would be THE number one priority. Every other "decent" media player that I know of has this feature, whether it's native or an extension/add-on. But the add-on for Songbird has been long outdated.
Personally, i find the lack of this feature, while the development team focuses on more cosmetic features, simply unacceptable. I have music that I want to add to my library, but Winamp's method is via an extension and the whole process is rather messy. It sounds like they have the right idea for how to do it with Songbird, but we need this feature NOW. It really needs to be made top priority, and it looks like there are a LOT of people that agree with that.
Once this feature is added, I will make a full switch to Songbird... but this is a huge disappointment to me, so far.
And hopefully there will not be a total of 3 options for naming schemes or organizational systems, like I found suggested in some of the development notes. I would suggest, as many others already have, looking at iTunes' organization system, and having it nicely customizable... But when I was using iTunes on my Mac (I've since moved my music library to a Win XP system), even iTunes was far from perfect and made the library virtually unusable by any other software. Hopefully, whatever they do for Songbird will actually work so that the library can easily be accessed and understood by other media software.
I've already got my music all organized, I just need to be able to keep it organized that way and have newly added music organized into the same scheme.
I use "...Music Library\Artist\Album\Artist - Song Title.mp3" for my main organization/naming scheme. If the track is part of a compilation of multiple artitsts, I use "...Music Library\Compilations\Album\Artist - Song Title.mp3". So I hope there will be a way for me to organize compilations separately, even if it's perhaps a filter criteria that I can set to look for "part of a compilation" in the metadata comment field. That's the thing that I do like about Winamp's organization extension that I use, it uses search/filter criteria to determine how to organize specific tracks... so a simple implementation of something like that would be a nice addition, or at least a check box to keep compilations grouped/organized together, like in iTunes.
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Yeah! That ́s the point. Personalization. I keep itunes for the same reason!!
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I already put in my 2 cents about this, but I SO agree. You expressed it in a much more articulate way, though. This feature, as the mods will tell you, IS rolled into the currently downloadable beta. Hooray!
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This comment was removed on 06/08/09.
see the change log -
Meanwhile you can use mp3tag (from www.mp3tag.de) to organize your music. Thats how I do it. Once the music is in it's place, Songbird automatically adds it to my library. So for me music organizing feature is completely useless for me. Just because it is for some unclear reason very important to you doesn't mean it is important for everybody else too.
There is still missing cue-sheet support, transcoding, fxing playback problems, making the GUI more responsive etc. These things are much more important to many people including me. -
JeCh. Thanks.
But what about the automation? how do you do it?. Just tell it to observe changes ?
I ́m affraid to do it now. i don ́t want to loose anything. -
In mp3tag you can choose any pattern to convert tags to path and vice versa. It can also get tags from Internet if you have a complete album. Once you have your files tagged properly it will rename your music into any directory and filename scheme according to your settings. But be careful, because you can easily do something wrong since mp3tag renames the actual files, it doesn't make a copy of them.
Then you just tell Songbird to watch the directory where is your music stored and it will automatically reflect the changes.
I believe that Songbird should in first place focus on music playback (as it is a player in first place) and library reading and once it works correctly then add functions which already can be done easily by other programs. This includes CD ripping, burning, automatic file organization etc. I don't say there shouldn't be these features, but I think they are not that important.
From marketing point of view it makes perfect sense to focus on functions for powerusers, like I mentioned in my first post, because they are the ones who will tell the world about Songbird via their blogs, webpages or articles in computer magazines. But if the power users won't be happy with Songbird, they won't recommend it. -
Inappropriate?Nice.
I'm trying the beta version. It comes with the organizer.
It ́s simple, perfect, and enough for me. Maybe people can find it doesn ́t fit their needs... i understand that.
I have some suggestions:
When there's no author on a song or cd , for example, it says the WHOLE name.
It ́s in spanish
"Nombre de álbum de artista. desconocido"
It ́s very long. U_U It should say: desconocido (Unknown). It makes them very long.
One more thing. I had problems changing the name of this same folder. I updated it and they gave me error: we couldt do it .
But no information, nothing about what ́s happening. But it did it!, it changed everything... what failed?? that confused me a lot. What was wrong ?
Thanks!
I’m undecided
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Inappropriate?Oh! and what about this:
i have my music, nearly 100 gb of it. Now, i want to import it to my new brand SongBird. And ... when you tell it to organice: it copies EVERYTHING. i haven ́t enough disk space for the exchange. What if i import and it is already in the folder?.
I find it quite confusing. There's something i hate: loosing control, and loosing songs, found years later, in a galaxy far far away....
I’m happy
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Inappropriate?Oh. i know what happened.
I was playing the song, and when you rename, it stays there, it can ́t do nothing with it. You should deselect it firstly when moving it. Isn ́t it?1 Comment Add a comment
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There ́s no way to do it by myself. There's no "stop" button.
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Inappropriate?:D one more thing.
I used the feature that keeps track of changes and set it to this same folder and it works fine... maybe you should put together this things. Or do it automatically when you turn on the organizer. right? -
Inappropriate?We'll if you haven't noticed by the recent discussion already, Songbird 1.2 is out! And the ability to automatically organize your library files in all its glory is in there, begging for you to play with it!
So what are you waiting for!? Go Get Songbird!
I’m excited
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@Michael Purses....I have been playing with the beta version and love your implementation of it as it is "almost" exactly as described. The "only issue" is that it does not allow for compilations.
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Compilation support is slated for the next release, Jackson 5..
You can follow the bugs here -
I gave up on waiting for Songbird 1.2 to come out before manually inputting all my rating information from Winamp...the iTunes export feature could have saved me a lot of work by allowing me to tell Winamp were all the files were moved and then Winamp could generate a new Library.xml file with the Songbird-set paths and existing rating info from Winamp.
Anyway, here's 1.2 less than a week after I did all that, but the iTunes export still doesn't seem to do anything anyway. The Library.xml file is not being created/written. What gives? I still need it so Winamp can use the library as I'm maintaining ratings/playlists/etc in Songbird, because my MTP media player doesn't show up in Songbird (though it's supposedly been supported for many months across several versions that I've used). -
Inappropriate?I like the feature, and it seems to work quite fine, but when I update some tracks (like fetching album art etc) I get the following error after a few seconds:
"Unable to manage your imported or updated items, please check the Media Management folder exists and is writable."
I don't know what to think of that, since the folder is existent and I can write to it.
Anyone?
I’m confused
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I've got this same problem. Permissions are set to 777, and the folder exists.
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ok thanks for the info... is this just when "fetching artwork" or are there other occurrences when this can happen? Ill try to test/reproduce this soon..
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I'm getting this too, on Windows, even when running Songbird as administrator. Only noticed it so far on get album artwork.
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It looks like we are watching the album art property (primaryImageURL) when we shouldn't be :(. We should create a bug with this and check the service for when it has OnItemUpdated called.
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read my comment down there. I think i ́ve found the reason for this. And a big problem, if it happens.
And it seems everybody has the problem. CHAOS!! -
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Inappropriate?When I delete a track or tracks from my library with file management enabled, it seems to remove the files from my hard drive completely rather than sending them to the trash. This can be a problem if you accidentally delete something, so I think it should always send the files to the trash first.
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a good one! really important.
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Inappropriate?All of this is wonderful but scares me... really. I ́m scared to use it freely without thinking that i ́ve lost something , and i don ́t know what.
I really feel something could go wrong and my music lost.
Too many music files to keep a back up.. and then, how to check? ...
hard thing.
I’m thankful
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If you've no space for a physical backup, you've an even bigger problem than trusting a potentially buggy Songbird. Hard drives die all the time.
I'd recommend getting an external drive for backups, or at least burning some DVD backups once in a while. -
Yes. I have two backups xD... But takes exactly ... 5 hours to do it. It ́s very frustrating. :)
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Inappropriate?I see what happens, once again. As i said , when you are playing one song, and at the same time you change something of it (metadata), it says that you have no permission.
You should stop the song and change it. Imagine if you do this with 1000 songs, and it tells something ́s gone wrong!... then you don ́t know what happened, because you haven ́t cancelled all the process and came back to where it was, so you just loose control of what song failed, or what songs. That starts to confuse people O_o
Usually when something fails, everything is cancelled and back to the past, but not this time . Everything but the file that was wrong. And all mixed! what a mess...
I’m frustrated
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mm. Not only that!... oh goshhh.... i made a mess here, and just 3 cds!!...
It failed, as i said, the song i was playing. Everything is ok in songbird... or looks like ok. But 11 songs are in one folder, and the failed song stays SEPARATED in other folder (the old one with old genre). The rest, perfect, but this one that failed, is still in the folder where it was when it failed, and it ́s registrated with the new information in songbird, so i can ́t change the name or genre to put it all together with the rest of the songs, because everything is "virtually" ok, but the song is lost in another folder...
This will make a mess of people ́s libraries. MAKE BACKUPS BEFORE DOING ANYTHING!! O_O -
Inappropriate?@All: See the bugs filed in this reply and add your me too's. http://getsatisfaction.com/songbird/t...
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Inappropriate?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’m wondering if "anticipatory" is a word that makes any sense in this context
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compliations! Don't even get me started. I just had to completely annihilate my entire library and restore it from my external hard drive backup becuase I totally hadn't clocked the lack of support for complications....
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@ Tim: ugh. :0(
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Ah, it wasn't too much hassle actually. Something somewhere went totally awry and my bird completely failed to load outside of safe mode for a week. Think it may have been a sketchy add on which wasn't too happy. Anyway, I took restored my backup of my music collection, nuked my sb installations and profiles and everything and started again clean. Pulled in my old iTunes library and download my last.fm playcounts (I can't thank Nick enough for V.I.) and now I'm pretty much good to go which isn't bad for an afternoon :) When I can keep a backup copy of all my metadata in the cloud, I will be extremely pleased. I need a library scrobbler which will patche the differences between local and last.fm counts and support for storing ratings. Maybe I'll go see if rating file will work for me now.
Hell it's a gorgeous day, maybe I'll have a pint.... -
dammit my grammar died in there somewhere. the comment box is too small to read what you've written!
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LOL, you're all good. Enjoy that pint!
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Inappropriate?Hi Graham,
Consider it read! I'm sure you've seen that Get Satisfaction is nothing short but on fire in regards to the manage music topic. So the short answer to your question is sadly, nope. But the best thing to do might be to remove the good stuff from the library, turn management on and let it be managed, then turn it off and import the good stuff again.
I’m all for anticipatory!
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anticipatory is kinda par for the course round here! ;)
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word.
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Inappropriate?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.
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Yes. That ́s what i want. And i ́m anxiously waiting for this feature to work perfectly. I don ́t want to have a mess with my music.
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Inappropriate?1. Compilations
I may have this completely the wrong way, but I don't understand what the problem with compilations is. I have many albums that are compilations. I put 'Various' in the album artist field, and then the album name, so they are all neatly organised by Songbird in a 'Various' folder (I personally use the year as a subfolder, and then the album title as a further subfolder). In fact, I think Songbird has a clear advantage here, because many other programmes do not use an 'album artist' field.
2. Ignored folders
I am running two Songbird profiles, so that I can have different options enabled for different music collections. This means that not all of my music is available under a single profile, but this is fine for my purposes.
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Thanks for posting what's working for you nygamma, makes sense to me. :0) It's always so interesting to see the various solutions different people come up with towards a similar end.
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Inappropriate?Hi Graham and darkgaze,
You're best bet is to follow the bugs here: http://bugzilla.songbirdnest.com/bugl... As for time frame, 2 are Triage ASAP, so you know, like fast, and 3 are set to future, sooo, not so fast. If you don't feel your needs are represented in those bugs, you can file a new feature request here.
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ok :(
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Inappropriate?Great job guys,
I'm really happy to see that Songbird can organize my library!
However, this feature is useless for me at the moment as I can't follow the structure I'm used to:
Artist / Year - Album / Track Number - Title.ext
I think it's really nice to have albums in chronological order. And actually I miss the same thing in the media view.
So can't you make library management a bit more customizable?
I believe it must look like a string that Songbird can parse. For example:
"%Artist / %Year - %Album / %Number - %Title" - will look good for me.
"%Artist / (%Year) %Album / %Artist - %Track - %Title" - will look good for someone else.
I’m excited
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i'm in jc's boat.
i looked through all the add-ons and no one had anything for this.
being able to specify the format beyond the 2-3 parameters that are currently available is very important (and a HUGE reason why i don't use/support iTunes).
i name my artist releases:
%Artist/%Album/%Artist_%Track_%Title
and compilations:
Various Artists/%Album/Various Artists_%Album_%Track_%Artist-%Title
i also noticed that it lowercased the entire file name too. i want it to match my folder names.
i'm less worried about all the cds i've ripped because they're all consistent and they way i want them. i'd really like a tool to go through everything else! -
i'm in jc's boat.
i looked through all the add-ons and no one had anything for this.
being able to specify the format beyond the 2-3 parameters that are currently available is very important (and a HUGE reason why i don't use/support iTunes).
i name my artist releases:
%Artist/%Album/%Artist_%Track_%Title
and compilations:
Various Artists/%Album/Various Artists_%Album_%Track_%Artist-%Title
i also noticed that it lowercased the entire file name too. i want it to match my folder names.
i'm less worried about all the cds i've ripped because they're all consistent and they way i want them. i'd really like a tool to go through everything else! -
Inappropriate?okej, i dont think i really got a hang of this, starting to but i sure didnt check it up before i started to organize my library.
great idea but now all my compilations are scattered around in folders under the artist name and i dont seem to be able to get all the tracks back into the right folder, for example the folders are named va - xxxxx.
anyone now how to fix it? i would be forever grateful!
I’m confused
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Inappropriate?To all:
There is a nice way to get your compilations not scattered around.
- Use the AlbumArtist tag:
---- For compilations, set this tag to one single value, "Compilation", or 'Various Artists" for instance
---- For other tracks, copy the Artist tag into the AlbumArtist tag (use the Tagger extension to do that, it's very powerful. http://addons.songbirdnest.com/addon/... )
- Now all your tracks should have an AlbumArtist
- Update the structure of the Manage Music in the Options: set it to 'AlbumArtist\Album' instead of the default 'Artist\Album"
- Songbird will move all your files to a new structure, with all compilation tracks in a single "Compilation' folder, and all other tracks sorted by Artist.
I'm sure the result will be similar to what you are looking for.
Note that you can also add the field AlbumArtist to the 3-selector pane, as a selector, and also as a displayed column in the list of tracks (by right-clicking on the header rows of both the list and the selector pane)
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Inappropriate?thank you klint for the help...i do understand how this will be done and work the way i want it. i installed tagger but i have never used a tag genereator before and wonder if there is any how-to-use out there, been looking could not find.
I’m thankful
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Inappropriate?The only help I know about the the one provided by Tagger (navigate to that URL in Songbird to display it again: chrome://tagger/content/welcome.xul)
There are tooltips as well within tagger
Basically, to copy Artist to AlbumArtist with Tagger:
- select a bunch of tracks you want alter tags from
- Select the Set&Combine tag in Tagger's panel
- Uncheck all boxes
- Tick the AlbumArtist one and enter %a in the field (act as a placeholder for Artist, and will Copy Artist into AlbumArtist)
- Click on "Set tages on selected files"
At that point, tags are updated in Songbird library database.
If you want them to be written back to files, go to the "To file metadata" tab, uncheck all but Albumartist and click "Save tags"
Hope this helps
I’m confident
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Inappropriate?I'm glad that this was implemented in the latest version, but there is an additional modification that I'd like to suggest:
In addition to having the ability to manually customize the directory structure, would it be too much to ask to add an option so that when you enable "Manage My Music", users could select "mirror iTunes' directory structure", or something like that. I think that this might help ease the transition from iTunes to Songbird so that new users wouldn't have to worry about their entire library getting completely reorganized/messed up when they enable this feature or want to switch between the 2 at will.
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