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Managed Mode: What the h*ll did your software just do to my library?
I'm trying very, very hard to give you the benefit of the doubt right now. And I apologize for the anger you're about to read. But I am absolutely livid about what your software has done to my library.
I installed the app. Went through a few settings and tried using the app. The next thing I know, ALL of my music, thousands and thousands of songs, are in total disarray. They're out of the folders they were in, the folders were scatters around, the hierarchy I had setup is now non-existent, the songs were renamed, they're everywhere but where I had them, etc. Everything has been completely scattered around as if I'd had a 10,000 piece puzzle put together perfectly and then the wind comes along and blows all the pieces around.
The nearest thing I could find that looks like it may be the culprit is something called "Managed Mode". Well guess what? You have no help file anywhere describing what that feature is and hardly any post about it. So, that's about as intuitive of an offending "feature" that I can find.
Like many, I've been collecting music for many years. During those years, I've worked very hard to have my music organized accordingly. IE: Genre, artists, etc. You know...the normal organizational techniques. Now, it's going to take me *MONTHS* to fix what your stupid program has done to my stuff.
I would LOVE some explanation to this. I would love for someone to say something to me to pacify my anger right now.
1) Where do you get off putting this "feature" in your app without very explicit indications of what the "feature" is going to be doing?
2) How in the h*ll am I to fix what your software has done to my library without having to touch every freaking song I have manually???
I installed the app. Went through a few settings and tried using the app. The next thing I know, ALL of my music, thousands and thousands of songs, are in total disarray. They're out of the folders they were in, the folders were scatters around, the hierarchy I had setup is now non-existent, the songs were renamed, they're everywhere but where I had them, etc. Everything has been completely scattered around as if I'd had a 10,000 piece puzzle put together perfectly and then the wind comes along and blows all the pieces around.
The nearest thing I could find that looks like it may be the culprit is something called "Managed Mode". Well guess what? You have no help file anywhere describing what that feature is and hardly any post about it. So, that's about as intuitive of an offending "feature" that I can find.
Like many, I've been collecting music for many years. During those years, I've worked very hard to have my music organized accordingly. IE: Genre, artists, etc. You know...the normal organizational techniques. Now, it's going to take me *MONTHS* to fix what your stupid program has done to my stuff.
I would LOVE some explanation to this. I would love for someone to say something to me to pacify my anger right now.
1) Where do you get off putting this "feature" in your app without very explicit indications of what the "feature" is going to be doing?
2) How in the h*ll am I to fix what your software has done to my library without having to touch every freaking song I have manually???
I’m very, very angry!
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First off thank you all for your responses here, I was one of the main developers of this feature and I appreciate getting feed back on it.
As for the UI issues, yes we do lack in documentation and this is something I will be bringing up with the product managers. We are given a limited amount of time to do what they require, documentation has never had time allocated for it. This is a major oversight on our part and I apologize for my lack of attention.
As for the feature itself there are a few things we assumed when building it, number one we did not enable it by default. If you are enabling a feature you do not understand I would assume that you would ask about it first. However it looks like for some people this is not the case and they have enabled it anyways. We also tried to follow along the same flow that iTunes does when it organizes music, this includes copying from external folder only (not moving) to prevent loss of media. This is why when a user selects a different folder than where there media is currently located they get a complete copy of the media. When items are renamed or the folder is the same as where the media is located then we move items around in that folder, which is why you will see all of your media reorganized since it is based on the meta data tags.
In any case this is a new feature which as any other new feature should be used with caution, we try to test our features out as best we can, and we have beta versions that allow other users to test as well (understanding that they may loose information). Unfortunately we can not catch every bug or different users perspective.
There has been an excellent community effort to document how Songbird works on our wiki: http://wiki.songbirdnest.com/Getting_.... I recommend this to everyone using songbird now or in the future.
Thank you again for your response, and if you have any more questions or issues please post here so we can make Songbird the best media player out there :).
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So, this reminds me of when I first started collecting music, WMP stored all of my tag changes in a separate file, so when when my database started getting corrupted and the index references were all out of whack it wouldn't have been a problem.
simple solution, delete the separate file, rescan my music and all the corruption is gone.
So I did this four or five times. Needless to say I lost all of the changes I had made to the titles, artist, ratings, genre,etc.
then I learned about tags and went about scanning my library (which was growing), make a whole bunch of changes to my music then enable writing the changes and when my library was updated, DISABLE writing the changes until the next time I had a whole bunch of changes to make.
Occasionally I forgot to disable that option, occasionally WMP indexes got terribly corrupt and I lost hundreds of hours and thousands of songs because of that crappy program.
I tested out several programs that were available at the time(some of which were really bad, I mean having to reinstall windows 95/98/XP from scratch because they screwed up my system so badly).
then I used Helium music manager, much better but still the occasional problem that caused many of my files to be renamed ".mp3".
So now, LIKE YOU I am searching for another program to use, because I am not happy with the ones I used before.
I have learned this simple equation, new program=be careful, learn everything you can about how it works and before I let it take control of my file/directory/tag renaming process do some tests on copies of files/directories to make sure it works ok.
I have just started using songbird, now I have about 50K files and I haven't turned on any options yet.
I do want to have my files and directories put in better order, but I won't turn on the managed files option until I have tested it out, and then only while I am doing a major update/edit.
Every program I have ever used used to update files/tags has had problems, I spent many hours learning about tags, database programs, searching forums to find out about programs I wanted to use, in brief, understanding as much as I could about my valuable music/ audio file collection and the programs I wanted to use to manage it.
I sympathize with you, I have had many when I have first turned on a new feature I really wanted to use, swallowed hard and occasionally have been near tears when I have seen the result(jumping ahead sometimes, without testing on a copy).
I know that everytime I use a music program, even if it has worked perfectly in the past, I am taking a risk. But I still take trips on planes, get in my car each day to go to work, cook over a gas stove, drink alcohol, and eat fatty foods.
Les Brown said:
"If you cannot risk, you cannot grow.
If you cannot grow, you cannot become your best.
If you cannot become your best, you cannot be happy,
and if you can't be happy, what else is there?"
So learn about tags, make sure you update your file names to tags, then turn on reorganize your music and hold your breath. (then turn it off, hard drives have allowances for errors after so many writes, if the error happens in one of the indexes, good luck chuck...)
And BTW, I have been in computer field for over 20 years, as far as backups go, if you make a backup if case of fire each day, then leave the backup tapes/disks/drive on top of the computer you might as well not bother. Weekly backups, off site. If you are doing a backup every day, and overwriting that backup everyday, I sure hope you check every file you back up, every single day. 'Cos if you don't notice an error(s) until the next day.....
So volunteer to help with this project, which is in the works, volunteer to help with the documentation, testing betas, etc. If like me you want a good, fast, expandable music file manager, lets lend a hand and work together to make this one the best one ever.
I’m excited to make this the best it can be!
3 people say
this solves the problem
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As a happy Songbird user, I am sorry for your bad experience. However, ultimately it is you, the user, who "took it upon yourselves to virtually wipe my library out".
I also often try new software and features without knowing what exactly they will do and it has burned me many times. I think that your style of organisation (non-meta-tagged) is not the type that the Songbird Library structure is meant for. Perhaps VLC would be a better choice as it has almost no use for libraries and meta-tags, neither of which seem to help you.
Best of luck re-organizing your data.
I’m undecided
3 people say
this solves the problem
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Inappropriate?I don't really have anything to do with this, as I'm not technically an employee (as I don't work for POTI Inc.), but I can't even begin to imagine how devastating this is for you.
The only thing I can suggest is a system restore. It'll put your files back where they were, and Songbird 1.2 will vanish.
I’m extremely sympathetic.
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Inappropriate?If you had your files sorted by genre and then artist (or anything similar), then the management system can rebuild that for you if you tell it to do so; go to the "Manage Music" pane in the options window and set the drop-down boxes accordingly. This assumes of course that your files are tagged with the proper genres and artists and whatever else. If you had done something a bit more custom, then I'm sorry, but you'll have to shut off management (in the same options pane) and fix things manually; I don't think system restore would do it. And you have every right to be angry; Songbird's documentation is awful in general, and specifically users really (really, REALLY) should be warned if this feature is going to be on by default on new installations (which it really shouldn't be to begin with).
I’m having no trouble understanding your anger.
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mm, I'm pretty sure a restore would do it. We've used it before to reclaim lost files that have been deleted from the computer completely. -
Then I was probably wrong about that part; I don't use system restore very often.
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Inappropriate?I have another problem with managed mode, I don't know if this is the way its meant to work:
It seems turning it on organises another folder in your "my Music" folder called songbird music. For some reason it copies over all music files from the "iTunes music" folder and reorganises them in the songbird music folder. In other words my 100gb music folder swelled to 200gb.... Now while it was pretty easy for me to just delete the songbird music folder altogether - and clearly this would probably have been a better option for "angry Customer" - are you serious? This is the best way to manage a music library? Copy each of 100gb total files and paste them again in the same directory in a different folder?
I’m insync with the anger caused by "managed mode"
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Yes, this is the default behavior, but it can be changed. The idea is that files added to the library are collected in one central location and then the original files can be deleted; good for adding individual songs or albums, not so much for whole libraries. If you don't want this, you can set the library folder in the management settings to wherever your library currently is and nothing will get copied (however, this may be what leads to the issue I described in http://getsatisfaction.com/songbird/t... ).
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Wait, I think the point of this behavior is that you can then see what Songbird's hierarchy looks like before letting Songbird completely overwrite your own hierarchy.
Doesn't that make sense? Then you can decide if you'd like to use Songbird's system, or, like you said, delete the "Songbird Music" folder and turn off managed music and use your own existing system. -
Inappropriate?G'day,
Someone else recently pointed this out too (surprisingly, nobody seemed to identify it as a problem during public beta testing despite the enormous number of users using the beta). I agree its a problem mainly caused by inadequate information provided, and therefore I posted the following bug reports in response:
1) http://bugzilla.songbirdnest.com/show...
(This adds a dialog that warns the user that the layout of files will be changed when turning managed music on).
2) http://bugzilla.songbirdnest.com/show...
(This allows users to set whether music should be moved or copied into the directory)
3) http://bugzilla.songbirdnest.com/show...
(This allows easier access to help in songbird)
4) http://bugzilla.songbirdnest.com/show...
(Adds detailed help to Manage Music menu).
I do agree something should be done to make it clearer (at the very least #4 at a minimum should be added). All 4 of these solve the problem completely as well as fixing a few other minor problems, and the most useful fix also happens to be the easiest.
However, I will admit that I don't think POTI cannot be blamed entirely because whilst more information should be added, the included text "Structure folders as" and "rename files as" surely should have set off a few alarm bells. And during the public beta, I don't recall seeing anyone on get satisfaction who accidentally enabled it. That's just a personal opinion though, and similar to Dustin, I am not an employee of POTI either.. Whilst I agree the lack of information contributes to part of the problem, I don't believe its entirely their problem (its similar to how everyone was blaming windows for every email trojan out there, including some which were spread entirely by social engineering).
Whilst it is unrelated, I would also strongly suggest that you set up a backup too...
Either way, I'd love to see my bug fixes implemented to prevent this occurring more often, and knowing POTI, they likely will be ;) Because at the end, feedback is good and it helps prevent user error entirely
Andrew
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Andrew, please see my replies to Stevo. I'll just say that I'm not an idiot. Maybe a gullible optimist, but not an idiot (not accusing you either, just leaving a little disclaimer).
The fact is, the program shouldn't have touched anything it knew nothing about. I wish I could post a screenshot to show you just how screwed up my library is right now. Again, see more details in my post back to Stevo.
And yes, I have very good backups. However, by the time I'd realized what happened, my backup utility had overwritten all my backups with backups of the bad data.
My library is toast. Thanks SongCrap. -
Angry Customer,
What did you expect manage music to do? You didn't notice the section which said "structure folders" and text which said "rename files as"? Its that reason why I don't think its entirely Songbirds fault.
And did Songbird screw up your library by itself, or did you change a setting to permit it to do so? -
Again, I'm definitely guilty of being the "gullible optimist" in putting my faith in the programmers. To me what would be common sense was apparently missed by them in not only their development and QA cycles, but also in Beta testing. I'll eat what's mine to eat: chalk this one up as both a lesson I'll not soon forget and a permanent scar to remind me. However, it's apparent to me, and obviously many others, some very serious considerations were missed.
And, again, I did expect manage music to do what everything stated. But I didn't expect it to dump all my stuff that it DID NOT understand into a home-grown bit bucket. That sir cannot be contested as my issue. It's quite obviously theirs. -
Inappropriate?Hold on now, I'm seeing two different behaviors here. Naegling says that his/her entire library was duplicated into a new folder using Songbird's hierarchy. Which makes sense, because your custom structure is left alone, and you can then decide which structure you'd like to keep. It's like seeing the end result before it happens.
But "Angry Customer" says that his custom structure was set way out of whack, which is a completely different scenario than Naegling.
Am I right? -
Inappropriate?I feel with you, Angry Customer. I ran into this trap, too! :-( Here is another thread about this problem.
@Dustin: I think the problem is, when you set your default music folder to the root for the managed folder (because the options are very unclear and there is no extra warning), your old file-structure and and the new managed file structure are messed up. So I guess the problem is the same, only the impact is different (depending on your settings).
I had luck, and choose a different folder, so I had only to delete the copies, and still was frustrated. So I totally can understand Angry Customers frustration.
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Inappropriate?So, how the heck did these problems not get picked out in the beta testings?1 Comment Add a comment
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The problem is in the UI-Design, the very unclear Options & missing warnings. It's nothing technical.
So my guess is, two things lead to this in the final:
1.) The POTI-Team knows its own program too good, so it's very likely that they just didn't see the UI-Problem, because everything might be totally clear for someone, who works with it all day.
2.) Only a few people test a feature like "manage musicfolder" in the beta. I didn't do it either. The once who tested it, probably knew exactly what they were doing, so they didn't fell into the UI-Trap either. -
Inappropriate?@dustin: while I agree that making a new folder is a good idea IF you are starting out with a new library, when you have a library the size of a 100gb on 250 gb hardrive....you dont really want a full duplicate of it sitting there. I think what might be a better way - and I dont know the compatibility/syncing issues this might raise or even solve with regards to iTunes - is that manage media should reorganise the folders within My Music. What I mean by that is organize the iTunes folders itself (provided it can be done in a stable manner and one that doesn't disrupt either media player). If this doesnt appeal then perhaps leave the iTunes folder by itself and organise other single files and folders in the My Music directory. Itunes does a pretty decent organising job anyway so you could perhaps leave those as is. However, most people wouldnt be keeping all their music in the itunes folder - atleast i dont. so yeah
thats my mini rant...:P
"So, how the heck did these problems not get picked out in the beta testings?" yeah... i hear atreiu on his points about this but still... its a major feature of this release and one that impacts very heavily on media management (and playback even) so i feel its something that should have been tested far more vigorously.
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Inappropriate?First off thank you all for your responses here, I was one of the main developers of this feature and I appreciate getting feed back on it.
As for the UI issues, yes we do lack in documentation and this is something I will be bringing up with the product managers. We are given a limited amount of time to do what they require, documentation has never had time allocated for it. This is a major oversight on our part and I apologize for my lack of attention.
As for the feature itself there are a few things we assumed when building it, number one we did not enable it by default. If you are enabling a feature you do not understand I would assume that you would ask about it first. However it looks like for some people this is not the case and they have enabled it anyways. We also tried to follow along the same flow that iTunes does when it organizes music, this includes copying from external folder only (not moving) to prevent loss of media. This is why when a user selects a different folder than where there media is currently located they get a complete copy of the media. When items are renamed or the folder is the same as where the media is located then we move items around in that folder, which is why you will see all of your media reorganized since it is based on the meta data tags.
In any case this is a new feature which as any other new feature should be used with caution, we try to test our features out as best we can, and we have beta versions that allow other users to test as well (understanding that they may loose information). Unfortunately we can not catch every bug or different users perspective.
There has been an excellent community effort to document how Songbird works on our wiki: http://wiki.songbirdnest.com/Getting_.... I recommend this to everyone using songbird now or in the future.
Thank you again for your response, and if you have any more questions or issues please post here so we can make Songbird the best media player out there :).
I’m happy
The company and 4 other people say
this solves the problem
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Nothing about what you've said here "solves the problem". There needs to be another button/link up there that says "Problem Not Solved", or something to that effect. Or how about one that says, "Songbird pwned My Entire Frickin’ Audio Library".
Your comments mean nothing to me now that 80% of my library has been renamed and dumped in an "Unknown" folder. I'm so seethingly pissed off right now this text can't come close to describe how I feel.
Listen to me carefully sir/ma'am: You took it upon yourselves to virtually wipe my library out. I now have MP3’s named “wtts.mp3”, “yknm.mp3”, “zwip.mp3”, etc. They’re all sitting in the aforementioned Unknown Artists folder that you created. I guess it never dawned in your gray matter that some folks have a ton of stuff that's off the radar.
IE: When I put the original CD's in to rip, they don't have any info on the web for them. Business teachings, Indie label songs, MP3's I've digitized from cassette, etc. You renamed them all!!! You dumped them into an "Unknown Album" folder!!! How the h*ll do you expect me to fix this crap???
Maybe I’m not being quite so clear on just how serious this issue is. Let me correlate it to what happens to data on a hard drive. What you’ve done to my library is similar to what happens when the file allocation table is corrupted. Is the data still there? Yes. Is the integrity of each sector the same as it was? Yes. Is the data identifiable. *NO!* You have to have special software to do in and either make an attempt at reading what it can from the corrupted FAT or read the physical data off each sector.
For hard drive corruption, there’s software. However, for an MP3 that used to be labeled something in English, do you people have any utilities to tell me what the h*ll “xvmx.mp3” used to be called??? No, you don’t. So guess what? I now have over 5k file like this I have to figure out manually.
And attending to your comment, “If you are enabling a feature you do not understand I would assume that you would ask about it first. However it looks like for some people this is not the case and they have enabled it anyways.”, I *thought* I understood it based on the meta-info listed there. But with no help button or direction on where to find help, I made the assumption that info was all I needed to know. I *thought* the programmers would’ve been smart enough to leave stuff alone that they know nothing about. Here’s a little pseudo-code for you:
If (theCurrentAlbumOrFile.FoundMetaDataOnTheWeb())
// go ahead and manage the file accordingly since we know absolutely what it is
Else
// we don’t know what this is, therefore we don’t dare touch it in any way, shape or form
That is the “assumption” you should’ve made when you did this.
I tell you the truth, I have no idea how to handle this. I’m probably never using this software again, and I’ll surely not recommend anyone ever touch it. I’m going with VLC or even Window’s Media Player. -
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Inappropriate?Just posting an opinion here.
But I really hope that this whole Managed Mode thing will NEVER EVER EVER be on by default. I have to drives of music (one folder on each drive) totaling more than 1.2TB. I only have one "watched" folder added because for some reason Songbird seems to only allow one watched folder. I wold be as angry, if not more so, than the OP if this Managed Mode was turned on by default.
Never understood the appeal to this when watched folders are much more easy and never touched/altered by the app..1 Comment Add a comment
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G'day,
I doubt it would ever be on by default. Because POTI would probably never want to decide how you should organise your music by default... -
Inappropriate?Replying to Stevo's reply and the so-called "This solves the problem" votes.
Nothing about what you've said here "solves the problem". There needs to be another button/link up there that says "Problem Not Solved", or something to that effect. Or how about one that says, "Songbird pwned My Entire Frickin’ Audio Library".
Your comments mean nothing to me now that 80% of my library has been renamed and dumped in an "Unknown" folder. I'm so seethingly pissed off right now this text can't come close to describe how I feel.
Listen to me carefully sir/ma'am: You took it upon yourselves to virtually wipe my library out. I now have MP3’s named “wtts.mp3”, “yknm.mp3”, “zwip.mp3”, etc. They’re all sitting in the aforementioned Unknown Artists folder that you created. I guess it never dawned in your gray matter that some folks have a ton of stuff that's off the radar.
IE: When I put the original CD's in to rip, they don't have any info on the web for them. Business teachings, Indie label songs, MP3's I've digitized from cassette, etc. You renamed them all!!! You dumped them into an "Unknown Album" folder!!! How the h*ll do you expect me to fix this crap???
Maybe I’m not being quite so clear on just how serious this issue is. Let me correlate it to what happens to data on a hard drive. What you’ve done to my library is similar to what happens when the file allocation table is corrupted. Is the data still there? Yes. Is the integrity of each sector the same as it was? Yes. Is the data identifiable. *NO!* You have to have special software to do in and either make an attempt at reading what it can from the corrupted FAT or read the physical data off each sector.
For hard drive corruption, there’s software. However, for an MP3 that used to be labeled something in English, do you people have any utilities to tell me what the h*ll “xvmx.mp3” used to be called??? No, you don’t. So guess what? I now have over 5k file like this I have to figure out manually.
And attending to your comment, “If you are enabling a feature you do not understand I would assume that you would ask about it first. However it looks like for some people this is not the case and they have enabled it anyways.”, I *thought* I understood it based on the meta-info listed there. But with no help button or direction on where to find help, I made the assumption that info was all I needed to know. I *thought* the programmers would’ve been smart enough to leave stuff alone that they know nothing about. Here’s a little pseudo-code for you:
If (theCurrentAlbumOrFile.FoundMetaDataOnTheWeb())
// go ahead and manage the file accordingly since we know absolutely what it is
Else
// we don’t know what this is, therefore we don’t dare touch it in any way, shape or form
That is the “assumption” you should’ve made when you did this.
I tell you the truth, I have no idea how to handle this. I’m probably never using this software again, and I’ll surely not recommend anyone ever touch it. I’m going with VLC or even Window’s Media Player.
I’m Immeasurably Angry
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Inappropriate?As a happy Songbird user, I am sorry for your bad experience. However, ultimately it is you, the user, who "took it upon yourselves to virtually wipe my library out".
I also often try new software and features without knowing what exactly they will do and it has burned me many times. I think that your style of organisation (non-meta-tagged) is not the type that the Songbird Library structure is meant for. Perhaps VLC would be a better choice as it has almost no use for libraries and meta-tags, neither of which seem to help you.
Best of luck re-organizing your data.
I’m undecided
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Respectfully, you are very wrong sir. Please read my latest reply to Andrew Luecke's post for the details on what I'm speaking of and why I emphatically disagree with you concerning my responsibility in this matter.
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Inappropriate?So, this reminds me of when I first started collecting music, WMP stored all of my tag changes in a separate file, so when when my database started getting corrupted and the index references were all out of whack it wouldn't have been a problem.
simple solution, delete the separate file, rescan my music and all the corruption is gone.
So I did this four or five times. Needless to say I lost all of the changes I had made to the titles, artist, ratings, genre,etc.
then I learned about tags and went about scanning my library (which was growing), make a whole bunch of changes to my music then enable writing the changes and when my library was updated, DISABLE writing the changes until the next time I had a whole bunch of changes to make.
Occasionally I forgot to disable that option, occasionally WMP indexes got terribly corrupt and I lost hundreds of hours and thousands of songs because of that crappy program.
I tested out several programs that were available at the time(some of which were really bad, I mean having to reinstall windows 95/98/XP from scratch because they screwed up my system so badly).
then I used Helium music manager, much better but still the occasional problem that caused many of my files to be renamed ".mp3".
So now, LIKE YOU I am searching for another program to use, because I am not happy with the ones I used before.
I have learned this simple equation, new program=be careful, learn everything you can about how it works and before I let it take control of my file/directory/tag renaming process do some tests on copies of files/directories to make sure it works ok.
I have just started using songbird, now I have about 50K files and I haven't turned on any options yet.
I do want to have my files and directories put in better order, but I won't turn on the managed files option until I have tested it out, and then only while I am doing a major update/edit.
Every program I have ever used used to update files/tags has had problems, I spent many hours learning about tags, database programs, searching forums to find out about programs I wanted to use, in brief, understanding as much as I could about my valuable music/ audio file collection and the programs I wanted to use to manage it.
I sympathize with you, I have had many when I have first turned on a new feature I really wanted to use, swallowed hard and occasionally have been near tears when I have seen the result(jumping ahead sometimes, without testing on a copy).
I know that everytime I use a music program, even if it has worked perfectly in the past, I am taking a risk. But I still take trips on planes, get in my car each day to go to work, cook over a gas stove, drink alcohol, and eat fatty foods.
Les Brown said:
"If you cannot risk, you cannot grow.
If you cannot grow, you cannot become your best.
If you cannot become your best, you cannot be happy,
and if you can't be happy, what else is there?"
So learn about tags, make sure you update your file names to tags, then turn on reorganize your music and hold your breath. (then turn it off, hard drives have allowances for errors after so many writes, if the error happens in one of the indexes, good luck chuck...)
And BTW, I have been in computer field for over 20 years, as far as backups go, if you make a backup if case of fire each day, then leave the backup tapes/disks/drive on top of the computer you might as well not bother. Weekly backups, off site. If you are doing a backup every day, and overwriting that backup everyday, I sure hope you check every file you back up, every single day. 'Cos if you don't notice an error(s) until the next day.....
So volunteer to help with this project, which is in the works, volunteer to help with the documentation, testing betas, etc. If like me you want a good, fast, expandable music file manager, lets lend a hand and work together to make this one the best one ever.
I’m excited to make this the best it can be!
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this solves the problem
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This solves the problem
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Hmmmm...a lot for me to think about Bret. I'll chew on what you've said and post more later.
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Just wanted to +1 on what Bret said. And to be clear from the start, I'm sorry to hear that your library got so messed up, AC. I don't blame you for what happened at all.
My two cents to add ... As a lurker from the 0.2 days of Songbird, I'm quite eager to hand over the reigns to Songbird, but I know that not everything is ironed out yet (you've come a long way already, POTI!). When the Manage Music option first showed up in the nightlies, I made an "SBTest" folder on my drive that had a copy of about 50 albums from my library. I used this test folder as a way to play around with all the new features and add-ons without fear of it messing up my 'real' library.
As a result of this, I figured out that SB wasn't going to completely ruin my library, but it would likely have a few hiccups along the path towards having it all under control. I would recommend doing something like this before enabling such a major option in ANY new piece of software, even one that has been around as long as iTunes. You just don't know what might happen, every person's setup is different. Be careful; testing new software is fun, but you have to be mindful of the risks. -
Inappropriate?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.
I’m waiting for the managed-mode scare stories to stop
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@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.
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Inappropriate?both WMP and helium do the old unknown artist and album thing. I found that out and lost 90 percent of the files it renamed. The directories were artist/album/ but it moved my files in the process and deleted the old directories. (I only got back / recognized 10 % and got so frustrated i deleted the rest in an act of <explenative> anger.) I used ant renamer but it isn't really up to the task i need it for, Helium seemed to be the best but slow, and even slower now i have a much larger collection.
Ask me about WMP 9..... lost some hair(and i don't have much) on that one...
I will try out id3 renamer, thanks for the reference.
I think with all the info in the tags bloating the DB there should be a mini/fast mode player<db> that just has the title/artist/album/genre and leaves the rest of the tag info alone. that way the DB could be much smaller, quicker to load, search, etc?
or several DB's, divided into ?? genres, ratings, a/b/c/etc??? and just load into memory the ones you are looking at?
So arn't you guys all glad I never got into programing? imagine the extra work cross updating all those DB's???
hmmmm, let's see, if you pay me 5 bucks a month, each of you, I promise never to do any coding, except maybe for microsoft....
</db>
I’m too long working with computers....
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Inappropriate?i hit managed mode when i was trying to find out why a new album i'd ripped wasn't showing up.
it duplicated my whole library into the songbird music folder!
which was a pain, but i guess i shouldn't have bashed the button without knwing what would happen. perhaps an 'are you sure?' prompt with a quick explanation would be good
I’m relieved
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switchback wrote:
"Perhaps an 'are you sure?' prompt with a quick explanation would be good."
Excellent idea! For such a potentially damaging feature, Are You Sure is the least Songbird could do. -
Inappropriate?What I don't understand is, that Songbird renamed all the files cryptically.. shouldn't it use the filename as title if no tag is present or am I wrong? I'm too using the managed mode and I have thousands of files with no metadata, but they have at least the filename in the title tag1 Comment Add a comment
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This is exactly what I was thinking. In the absence of actual metadata, the filename and maybe the directory name should be interpreted as metadata, like in the library view.
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Inappropriate?I had the same issue with Songbird 1.2 effecting a ton of changes to my mp3 library, which I also spent a lot of time tagging the way I want. My main music organizer/player is iTunes, which I actually like because it ***never, ever retagged my files automatically!!!*** It doesn't search the web automatically and change my tags willy-nilly.
Unfortunately, I am not a great fan of the iPods (I use a Sony mp3 player) so I can cannot use iTunes to sync songs. I use WMP11 for that purpose, and it does a good job, except that it has the same problem as Songbird in that it will automatically retag my files seemingly at random. And YES, I tried disabling that feature, I tried converting ID3 to ID1, etc. etc. but nothing worked. I even disconnected the internet when opening WMP11 but it STILL retagged when it felt like it.
And that's why I wanted Songbird to work, because I was tired of having to put up with something which should be simple..which is to say: just let me sync the songs I want to my player, and don't rewrite the files! Ever! Unless I change them!
Result?: Songbird is just as bad; it renames my tags (yes, you can say it was my fault for enabling this "feature" but it really wasn't intuitive that's what I was "authorizing"). Worse, it doesn't even sync with my player, even with the MTP device plugins I installed. Or it'll sync 1 out of 15 songs. And NO playlists. In other words, it was unworkable, and worse than WMP 11, which at least will sync anything to any device I have.
I realize Songbird is free, and I still want it (someday) to my main player, but my experience has been very disappointing. I know a lot of people put in a lot of their own time on it, and I appreciate the idea of a good open-source player, but it's not there yet. At the very least, Songbird should not produce unwelcomed or damaging effects without better warning. -
Inappropriate?Today I installed SB and started to playing around with it and now I feel like Angry Customer felt. My music collection (80GB) is ruined because of this software!!!
This problem was reported four months ago and there's still no change in SB! Is it so hard to add just a line of text next to "Turn Managed Mode On" button saying: "CAUTION: this will overwrite your files and folders"? I'm a developer too and I would never release a feature that changes (possibly destroys) user data without clear and visible information about the risk!
rm -rf ./Songbird
bye!
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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"...
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Inappropriate?Bug 17598 was the main story tracking bug for Managed Mode. Those bugs that you see under the "Depends on" section were just some of the bugs that were fixed during Kanye's development. There is also a warning now when deleting files from the library too.(see the updated wiki pages here).
Here is a look at what it looks like in 1.4:
You might be interested in grabbing the latest 1.4 build from here:
http://developer.songbirdnest.com/bui...
It is basically, unofficially, the official builds of what 1.4 will be. If that makes any sense... The Songbird team has some special goodies cooked up for us in the mean time that's making them busy :-D So I would highly recommend those 1.4 builds, they are very stable, and have ~773+ bug fixes, improvements, and feature implementations over the current 1.2 builds...
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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. -
Inappropriate?It would be great to select only a subset of files and be able to only put those in managed mode. Or move them in a one-time way. So I have some idea of what you're going to do, without the preview (which by the way, is great, but on my 68k tracks, it's a little tricky to use the interface).
Plus, I don't have EVERYTHING tagged, but I do have some things I'd to get reorganized. It would be great to selectively and/or one-time-use managed mode on my files. -
Inappropriate?I had the exact same problem. I don't want to rant about it here, though, I just want to drive one point home: treat a user's data as sacrosanct.
Stevo, your response made me angrier than the issue itself. I understand bugs, I'm a software engineer myself and have produced a few. Some of them were painful to my users.
A statement that suggests that the user may not have understood the feature and that bugs happen whatever you do is just not an appropriate response when it comes to situations where your bugs destroyed/messed up huge collections that take weeks or months to restore. Marking your response saying that you're happy is then just cynical.
In my particular case, I actually understand why you didn't catch the errors that occurred - there would have been opportunities to correct them, but the circumstances were somewhat obscure. I have a lot of understanding for the fact that the bugs existed.
Your attitude, on the other hand, I cannot muster any understanding for.
I’m sad, just sad.
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