Linked by Marcus Carlson on Wed 21st Jul 2004 18:17 UTC
In these days there has been much fuzzing about the new browsing with files organizing themselves with the help of meta data. Maybe you ask yourself "What have this to do with the spatial browsing in gnome and how can it improve the browsing?". That's what I did. As I see it, the gnome people have introduced the spatial browsing so we are used to it when this new browsing is coming to town. This is very intelligent move of the gnome people and will help us adopt faster to this. This is when the spatial browsing is really making sense. I hope you see this when you've read this article.
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One of the biggest issues is who will input this meta data. Lets take a very simple case today. That being mp3s. Mp3s have tags inside the file which include useful information like artist, genre, title...
Unfortunately, a lot of mp3s do not have those appropriately filled in. Winamp5 does a nice job of potentially trying to guess those fields from the file name. Like if the file name is "Joe Jackson - My good song.mp3" Winamp can extrapolate the appropriate artist, song name.
I've recently switched complately to the media library concept. I don't do any of kind of file renaming or organizing files in directories. I just winamp handle it all. Sadly, it really lacks in terms of user input. I have to select a file, choose to edit the file info, and then type in any needed fields. It would be nice to have a right click off the menu (change artist, chage genre)...or even edit it right in the media library list.
All the backend stuff really amounts to the same thing. A big database. Its this gui aspect that will make or break its success. For now, I'm just putting up with winamps.