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Not sure if anyone other than Tom and Dave have looked at the new /music stuff yet. If you already have, here are some changes from today:

You can now (in most situations) click on the artist and album column headings to sort alphabetically by artist or album instead of track name.

Search now works better.

If you /sync/, and all the files you sync are music files, you are automatically redirected to /music/yourname/recent where the new files will be right at the top.

The checkboxes let you edit (click 'edit' at the bottom - although you can only edit your own songs of course.) Note that you can edit multiple songs at once. This is especially useful if you are adding album and artist info (yeah, sorry, I can't read the id3 tags from the mp3 files yet.) On the edit page you can fill in the artist and album info one time, and have it apply to all the tracks you have selected for a multiple track edit.

So I'm imagining: FTP a whole album worth of songs. Go to /sync and they will be sucked into the database and you will be taken right to /music/username/recent where what you just uploaded will be at the top of the page. Click to select them all and on the edit page add the artist and album info in one place to assign them to all the tracks.

Also note that there is a checkbox at the very bottom that will select all the checkboxes above it (or unselect them if any are selected.)

Also to note, 'trackname' is distinct from the actual filename. So trackname can have any special characters or spaces or whatever you want. When you /sync the system just uses the filename as the trackname (probably I can make it smarter about this), but you're going to have to do a little editing no matter what. I leave the filename as whatever it was when uploaded, say, 01_ella_and_louis-I_wont_dance.mp3 and change the trackname to the more readable 'I won't dance', while making the artist 'Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald' and the album 'Louis and Ella Again'.

Since the system sorts by album and artist it would be nice if we could be careful with spelling. When entering artist names (again on the edit page) I also supply a pull down menu of artists already in the system. Take a look in there first, since using that for repeat artists will assure that all spellings are consistent.


- jim 3-24-2004 11:43 pm [link] [21 comments]