[Feedback] Request: A way to locally sort artists under same name

[Jeff Mitchell]

On Sunday 24 June 2007, Corrin Lakeland wrote:
> Mostly replying because I think Jeff was too harsh rather than because I
> think such a feature is important.
>
> > It's not a "pirate function".  If you share your legally obtained
> > music with others over a home network in a media server type setup
>
> Jeff: This is technically illegal.
>
> Not in most countries.

It's true.  In most countries in the world, there is basically no copyright 
system.  Also no clean water.

> > then you might want to keep other people on the network from editing
> > the files and messing up the tags.  Or, if you have a read-only disc
> > burned and mounted because your hard drive is full, you may want to be
> >
> > able to change an incorrect tag that was mistakenly left on the disc.
>
> Jeff: Or you could reburn a proper CD later and never have to worry
> about it again,
> Jeff: even if you lose your database.
>
> You only addressed the CD example.  For instance, my wife accesses our
> music collection using a program less flexible than Amarok (iTunes, as
> it happens). If I were to fix tags in Amarok then her access would be
> broken and so, from my perspective, the music is read-only.  It seems
> fairly reasonable that many people might have read-only access to a
> shared music server (at work perhaps, or a kid the parents think might
> accidentially corrupt the music).

You didn't address my comment about losing the database.  On top of all this 
code -- and user interface -- complexity, all these changes become tied to 
the database, which tend to be more fragile than we'd really like.

I also don't understand why you fixing tags would break your wife's access to 
music.  If iTunes is reliant on tags to play a file, which I didn't think was 
the case, then it's crap and you should use something else.  Most players are 
instead reliant on the path of a file.

I don't see the point in trying to justify this use-case with an artificial 
example, and I still don't see how, in general, this is a big problem.  If 
you have access to a read-only share, then it's up to the admin of the share 
to tag how they like it, and if you have a problem with their tagging, figure 
out a common method.  If you have a CD-ROM, reburn it.  Both of these are 
easier than a tag overlay.

> > Though this can be used to aide illegal downloading, sure, it also has
> >
> > several legit use cases.
>
> Jeff: Haven't figured one out yet.
>
> Well, for instance, a lot of lectures are available in creative commons
> and distributed by bittorrent.  It would be pretty reasonable to share
> them, and  want to 'correct' the tags in Amarok without changing the
> original.  For instance you might want to tag it as 'lecture' or 'open
> source' where the original was tagged as 'podcast'.

Then retag them as you like and either back up the originals, or re-download 
them if you want the original tags.  Or write down what the original 
genre/comment/whatever was.  This is still the scenario I spoke of where you 
don't have thousands of separate sources for one piece of media, you have one 
source that is replicated thousands of times, and so you have a central 
authority that tagged it how they felt proper.  If you want to modify it but 
don't want to share the modifications, don't share the modified files, share 
the originals.

> I personally believe another layer over your music file system would add
> far more complexity than tbe small benefits given above.  That said, I
> think there would be benefits.

Sure, every piece of functionality that could be added would have some 
benefits.  It'd be swell to have a button where every time you click it it 
keeps a running counter of how many beers you've drunk this week.

--Jeff