[Tellico-users] Several Issues

[Bill Gee]

Hello everyone -

I am in complete agreement with Peter on these points!  I have a few 
observations of my own to add.

Item A - I also run Fedora 23 and Tellico version 2.3.10.  On my system the 
option to Import Audio CD Data is greyed out.   I mentioned it a while back and 
was told it was probably disabled by the packager.  Since then I have not missed 
it much, certainly not enough to pursue it.  If Peter DOES have the function 
available, then it seems it is not a problem with the packaging.  Something else 
has caused it to go away for me.

Back when it did work, I found Tellico would almost always crash when trying to 
import data from an SACD Hybrid, especially disks from Pentatone Classics.  It 
got so bad I stopped even trying.  Tellico should NEVER crash when trying to 
import data.  It should have some sane method of handling errors during the 
import process.

As Peter observes, the data from MusicBrainz is extremely noisy.  FreeDB et.al. 
are probably even worse.

Item D - When "Import Audio CD Data" worked, I had the same problem as Peter.  
I could never find the item I just imported!  Now that the function is not available, 

For classical music I don't even bother trying to look things up online.  I just type 
it in.  For popular music I use the Search function.  It usually comes up with 
something reasonably close to usable.  Once I import it, I immediately hit Ctrl-E 
to edit.

On my system the Artist field allows multiple values separated by semi-colons.  I 
have a Composer field, and I also have Conductor and Ensemble fields.  It's 
been long enough that I don't remember if these fields came with the basic 
Tellico music collection or if I added them as custom fields.  In any event they 
are not multi-valued fields.  Looking through the Fields menu of Tellico, it 
appears to be easy to make them multi-valued.

Item F - I also store most of my music on a server share.  Most of it is in Tellico 
before ripping, so I don't have to import the tags.  On the few occasions when I 
did, it just worked.  

There is a disconnect between what is allowed in ID3 tags and what Tellico 
allows.  The one that bothers me most is the Artist field.  In a music file the 
Artist field cannot have multiple values.  In theory this is allowed, but in practice I 
have never found player software that properly recognizes the values.  For this 
reason importing direct from ID3 tags to Tellico seems rather pointless.

Bill Gee

On Friday, January 01, 2016 23:37:25 Peter Mayes wrote:
> I am running tellico 2.3.10 under Fedora 23, although I think the issues
> I want to raise have been around for many versions. But a New Year
> resolution is to tackle some of the items which have been on my ToDo
> list for ages!
> 
> My collection is about 1500 classical music CDs. There are several
> general problems with classical music. 1. the CDDB information which
> comes from the internet is, more often than not, very poor -
> inconsistent information for multi-CD sets, track information riddled
> with errors, and so on. 2. Most classical music involves three key
> pieces of information - a title (e.g. "Symphony No 9 in D minor"), a
> composer ("Ludwig van Beethoven") and performers ("Berlin Philharmonic;
> Simon Rattle")
> 
> Anyway, to the specific issues:
> 
> A) When using "Import Audio CD Data", some CDs crash Tellico. How can I
> collect more information to help debug this?
> 
> B) Suppose I want to add a cover image to an entry. I do "Edit Entry" >
> "Cover" > "Select image". The file dialogue has very large icons - they
> look like 64x64. I want 16x16, which I can get by dragging the slider to
> the left. But I want to set the smaller icon size by default. KDE
> applications like Dolphin remember the change of icon size.
> 
> C) I think when I first started using Tellico some years ago, I added
> "Composer" as a custom field. When I am updating a newly-added entry to
> the Composer field, if I start typing "Beet....", the existing choice
> "Beethoven" is presented for me to select and auto-fill. That is great.
> It also works when I have a CD with pieces by multiple composers,
> separated by semicolons. I would really like that to work for the
> "Artist" field, which often contains values that I have entered many
> times before, and often with multiple values again separated by
> semicolons, such as "Berlin Philharmonic; Simon Rattle".
> 
> D) My default view has the "Composer" field down the left-hand side, and
> then "Album" top right. I have a problem when I "Import Audio CD Data"
> for a new CD. I can't find it!! Because the disk/track information from
> the internet is so "varied", there is no guarantee that it is going to
> be under an existing "Composer". As soon as I import a new CD, I like to
> edit the information to correct the internet information. But it takes a
> looooong time for me to find the new disk!
> 
> E) When I change the Album, Composer, Artist fields after adding a new
> CD, if I look at the "tracks" pane, I only have "Title", "Artist" and
> "Length". The "Artist" field is the original from the internet, and
> doesn't reflect the change to the "Artist" field in the "General" pane.
> In fact, I would really like to have Artist and Composer fields in this
> view, as different tracks may be by different composers. So far, I
> haven't found any way to customise this "tracks" view.
> 
> F) My music collection is actually stored on a Network Storage Device in
> FLAC format, and I have taken a lot of trouble over the years to make
> sure that the individual FLAC tags are accurate. What I would really
> like to be able to do is to have some sort of "batch import" of textual
> tag information to load into Tellico's "tracks" field. I could do this
> manually using cut-and-paste, but with around 20,000 FLAC files, that
> will be VERY laborious! I'm not afraid of editing and scripting, but I'm
> not sure how best to achieve this.
> 
> G) Some entries have an extra blank row in the "tracks" field, which I
> can't seem to get rid of. If I right-click on the empty row and "remove
> row", the "Save Entry" button is greyed out, so the change doesn't seem
> to be detected. If I make a real change somewhere else, and also remove
> the row, and press "Save Entry", the empty row re-appears.
> 
> My apologies for the length of this post, and also if I have missed any
> obvious function.
> 
> Thanks in advance, and Happy New Year to all Tellico users.

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