[Tellico-users] Several Issues

[Robby Stephenson]

Hi Peter,

Thanks for the email. I appreciate the feedback and questions.

On 01/01/2016 06:37 PM, Peter Mayes wrote:
> A) When using "Import Audio CD Data", some CDs crash Tellico. How can I
> collect more information to help debug this?

Is it always the same CD? If it's fully repeatable, let me know which 
CDs. I might be able to take a specific look a the CDDB data for them. 
The best info comes from compiling Tellico with full debug support, then 
sending a backtrace from the crash.

> 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.

AH, interesting questions, I hadn't noticed that behavior until you 
pointed it out. The view type is remembered, but not the icon size. That 
dialog comes from a KDE library, but I'll poke at it to see if Tellico 
is doing something wrong.

> 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".

In the Collection Fields Dialog for that field, check that "Enable 
auto-completion" is checked for your Artist field.

> 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!

You could show and sort by "Date Created" in the column view. Recently 
edited and new entries are also in bold, for visual emphasis. What would 
make this work better for you?

> 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.

True, the information in the Tracks field isn't linked to any other 
fields. For me, if the album has tracks by various artists, I end up 
putting "Various" in the Artist field, and then putting the specific 
artist for each track there. But I understand that's less than optimal, 
for several reasons, like sorting, grouping etc.

> 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.

Does "Import Audio File Metadata" work for you? It imports directories, 
rather than files, and it's likely tobe extremely slow on a collection 
of your size, but the intent there is to do what you describe. Merging 
that import with the current collection should add it existing tracks if 
it matches the album.

> 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.

Any chance you can make an example Tellico file with that problem and 
send it to me directly?

Thanks!
Robby