Feature suggestions after matching a huge & messed up folder

MusicBrainz Picard
1

Background
Many years ago I tried to clean up my music collection which I completely botched up, mainly basically because I was just winging it without understanding what I was doing. This resulted in a big folder almost without any complete folder/release which was so bad that I gave up and switched to listening to streaming music. In recent weeks I decided to spent some time to get my old music collection in a somewhat decent order again.

Although Picard has been very useful to help with this, there are also some big disadvantages that hindered my workflow and made it much more difficult unfortunately. As a result of my experience with using Picard to import this botched up collection, I have composed a list of issues and feature requests that might’ve helped me to organize this messed up music collection easier and/or quicker.

I apologize if some of these suggestions have been suggested before, I didn’t looked up each of them. Also let me know if you prefer I submit this list differently, I didn’t want to spam you here by adding 14 separate feature requests so maybe we can use this topic at least to create a shortlist of potential feasible FR’s :slight_smile:

Feature suggestions

  1. Add option to horizontically split (un)clustered view into two separate views (i.e. a top view for unclustered and a bottom view for clustered files)

    • Sometimes clustering just doesn’t work correctly, not sure why, maybe because of white space issues in the tags. So my workflow was to first find a release for the cluster, then check the unclustered file list for files that maybe should be added to the release. If you have a long list of files, then that currently involves a lot of scrolling up and down. With two separate views you can keep the scroll position for both unclustered files as clustered files on the same position (i.e. at artists starting with the letter A)

  2. Option to move release/track back to unclustered/clustered file lists without dragging

    • If you are processing a large list then you might’ve thought that the releases Albumname and Albumname (Bonus) belonged to each other but after manually matching them with a single release it might turn out to be 2 completely different releases. As a workflow, instead of manually splitting the two merged releases it’d be easiest to move everything back to ‘clustered’ so you have the 2 separate clusters again. Currently you can only do this by dragging the releases back to the main Clusters (N) tree item, which means you have to make sure that that main tree item is scrolled into the view
    • When moving a single track back to clustered, then force it to be clustered. This would be helpful in cases where you want to manually move files back to Clustered one-by-one but you know they belong to the same cluster
    • Suggestion: add these options to the right mouse context menu

  3. Clustering should take artists better into account

    • Sometimes (often?) clustering does not differentiate between artists, but a lookup still matches a release so you end up with a release that has too many files. But due to the default columns it is not always immediately clear that this is because of completely different artists, I had this a couple times with Greatest Hits albums where I was trying to find a matching release but only after unable to find one I realized that it was just because clustering had combines files form Artist A & B

  4. Show file type / bitrates (if applicable) as columns

    • If you are matching duplicate releases then you can use these to group them as one release. I’ve noticed that in the dev release filesize has already been added, but file type (ie mp3 or flac) and bitrate (for mp3) would also be useful

  5. Create new, expand, submit releases from right view

    • F.e. in cases where you matched a release with 12/12 but realized you have an extra / 13th bonus track that was still listed under Unclustered files and no release with that bonus track already exists in musicbrainz

  6. Filter / sort by ‘completeness’ of release and/or filter / sort release by absolute / relative track count

    • F.e. to quickly see all matched releases with <=2 tracks to remove them or to see all releases with more files then the total track number
    • Suggestion: extend release completeness colouring to allow for eg 116% when release has 14/12 tracks?

  7. Make it visually easy to understand what the status of a matched release is

    1. Preferred Suggestion: preferably there should be a completely new/separate status column with a visually optimized UX, f.e. using something like a progress bar

      • One of the bigger issues I had was that the numerical status values are not aligned underneath each other, so it can be very difficult to see the actual status of an individual release, especially if you have say more then 10+ releases in the right view
      • The progress bar could have a green color relative to the number of correct matches if there are no duplicate matched or unknown tracks. So 1/12 is light green, 12/12 is dark green.
      • if there are duplicate matches, use a red progress bar (this is for status 12/12; 24 )
      • if there are too many files, but no duplicates and some files are correct: use a blue progress bar
      • In the progress bar show the current status text of 10/12; 2; 1
      • As mentioned above, it would be great if you can also sort on each of these statuses of number of missing/duplicate/unknown files
      • Do not include the release ‘save’ status in the ‘match’ status, those are two separate things and clutter the view. Currently the disc icon does this by changing the cd color from silver to gold, but if you’d add a progress bar like column that would probably be too much.

      If redesigning / adding a separate status column is not feasible, then maybe the following suggestions to better differentiate between different statuses are more feasible:

    2. duplicate songs

      • you can have the correct number of songs, but with 1 missing and 1 duplicate
      • Suggestion: use a double disc or broken disc icon

    3. unknown tracks / more songs then listed

      • the 26 is not very easy to remark: (13/13; 26*)*
      • Suggestion: use disc icon with a +

    4. combination of above: (9/12; 11*)

      • This is just very unclear to ‘notice’ at the moment, also because none of the release statuses are aligned underneath each other so your eyes have to go everywhere on the screen
      • Suggestion: not sure if it’d be a good UX to add another icon for this, maybe choose whether duplicate songs or unknown files are worse and use that icon? (This is also a reason why I think using a separate status column using a progress bar would be better UX, as that would provide you with more space / options)

    5. Use colour to quickly indicate how complete a release is, ie similar like track matching so dark green for 12/12 tracks and proportional lighter greens when less tracks

      • You might want to save a release with 11/12 but not with 1/12

    6. Show if album matches all normal tracks but not data/video tracks

      • You can toggle this to complete ignore in options already, but it might be even easier to be able to differentiate between a 12/12 album and a 12/12+4 (video tracks) album

  8. When adding new releases maintain double sort

    • f.e. when sorted on album, then artist and you add a new release the new release is always added as the first item of the artist

  9. Add text field to search / filter (un)clustered files (file name and/or tags)

    • When you know the file name but don’t know exactly where/how Picard matched that file

  10. Option to expand track list in album search results

    • Sometimes I was not exactly sure which release was the best fit, but I noticed that the one that Picard selects by default is not always the best (ie it prefers matching track count even if the tracks are duplicates). But also with singles with many different versions/mixes, it would be super nice if you could just quickly see the track list of a release to see f.e. which release has the track special bonus mix as track 3.

  11. Option to hide cover image in search results (but show the cover image in the metadata view)

    • The cover images cause a high row height so less results can be shown in the view and you have to scroll much more (less scrolling is better! ;))

  12. Don’t force the height of the metadata view

    • When the covert art is going to be updated, the metadata view shows both the original as new covert art. But this causes the height of the metadata view to be forced to show both cover arts
    • Suggestion: make covert art view also scrollable (and show new cover art above original)

  13. Option to remove files from disk

    • f.e. for when you have duplicate files and just want to remove the duplicates forever
    • maybe add global option to enable this feature (mainly to avoid confusing current users)
    • alternative, instead of removing files add option to move them to a Picard specific Trash folder

  14. When you add a new release or change a match from release A to release B, automatically scroll to the new matched release in the right view

    • Not all releases are guaranteed to have the same artist, but they are still grouped together. It can be very confusing that when you’ve matched a release for Artist A, and you then change the release it suddenly is matched as Group B of which Artist A was the main singer so you suddenly don’t see that release anymore in the view. Would be nice if Picard could then just autoscroll to the correct position of the just matched release
    • Preferably this behaviour could be toggled in options
2

@zas ? @outsidecontext ?

3

Those are mostly good suggestions. But it would be much more practical for us to have those as individual tickets.

4

Where would you like me to create those? Here or should I add them on https://tickets.metabrainz.org?

5

Please add them to https://tickets.metabrainz.org/ under Picard project.

We can discuss details there for each suggestion, and if we decide to implement we can link related code.

Not all suggestions you made are actionable, some might need sub-tasks, or may be related to existing tickets, and of course, some will be dropped for various reasons (after discussion ofc).

Please do a quick search among existing tickets to see if any fits before adding a new one.
Also feel free to attach mockup images.

1 Like
6

All understandable, just finished adding the tickets. I also understand some issues could potentially be implemented as a plugin instead, but I don’t think that can be done for the two main issues (splitting the view to prevent the need for endless scrolling and improving the merge status ux).

When the tickets are a bit more finalized I might also be able to help you with implementing some of the (lesser involved) tickets :slight_smile:

1 Like
7

Thanks for the suggestions and adding the tickets. I went over them and added a few comments. Some of the smaller ideas we already had tickets for.

If I haven’t commented on a ticket it doesn’t mean anything other than I think the idea is generally fine and could be done as soon as someone gets to it :slight_smile:

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