Amarok’s autonomous tagging of files

[Frank Steinmetzger]

Hello Folks,

I was about to file a bug concerning this, but then decided to bring it up 
here first so there’s the possibility for discussion beforehand. Besides, it’s 
not really a bug but more a question of philosophical approaches. :)


----- The issue: -----
recently I noticed the appearance of new tags in my files I could not explain. 
It turned out it was Amarok (current GIT) which wrote playback statistics into 
them (namely FMPS_Playcount and POPM (the track’s score)).

Having read up on the issue, I understand the concept behind it, like sharing 
rating information between music applications or re-importing the statistics 
into a fresh installation.


----- My problem with it -----
On the other hand I’m quite upset about it because it took me a long time to 
sort and clean up the tags of thousands of files. And now Amarok brings chaos 
back to it, for example by reintroducing the ID3 V1 tag and by messing up the 
mtime of the files, which causes constant confusion to my backup scheme¹.

Then there is the use case in which several people use the same files, for 
insance on multiuser desktops. A variant of that is when I share some files 
with friends; First, I don’t want to give away those information in the first 
place (which most of them can’t make any sense of anyway). Secondly I 
occasionally sync my classical collection with someone else’s, which is 
usually carried out based on mtime and/or filesize. Those two are normally 
determined only by tagging if the content itself stays the same. Now there’s 
much manual work involved to figure out which of the changed files were 
actually tagged properly.


----- What to make of it? -----
For the time being I have removed the write permission on the entire 
collection (~38k files) until this is sorted out. I don’t mind having the 
function in Amarok, as long as it is an opt-in. I know, „make in an option“ is 
not really an option, b/c if you did that with every request/critic, we’d be 
back at 5 tabs full of checkboxes. But still, for me, this is unacceptable 
behaviour ATM. Perhaps a button „export statistics to Tags“ or something.


----- Personal footnote(s) -----
I’m one of them old-school people who rely on the file system itself to 
organise their files and use tags only where particularly appropriate, such as 
in the collection tree. With this system, one is vulnerable to automated 
changes of file-system-based properties.

A related behaviour is that I have never trusted advanced music players with 
tagging, because you never know what else they write into the files that they 
don’t specifically show to the user. This is sadly the confirmation of my 
prejudice.



Sorry if this appears like a rushed rant from a random user who doesn’t look 
beyond his own narrow horizon, I just had to release some steam about it.

Don’t get me wrong though, Amarok has always been my one and only music player 
on Linux from day 1. I love for instance how the collection scanner was 
recently improved. In the past there were only minor things I didn’t like and 
I could usually just turn them off/configure them away, but this is the first 
time I really dislike something bad.     Phew, this turned from a small bug 
report into one hour of composing a readable text, so thanks for your time.


________
¹ This first came to my attention when I noticed that each time I ran a 
backup, rsync copied the entire podcast folder of several GB.
-- 
Gruß | Greetings | Qapla’
Wer mit Fremdwörtern nicht konvex ist, sollte damit nicht renovieren.