Separating the good and the bad
Nicola Larosa
I have a fairly diverse music collection, as most everyone here I guess,
also in terms of tag data quality, and there's no escaping the GIGO
principle: QL cannot help me, if I don't help it first.
I'd like to improve it, but I don't care about all of it in the same way,
obviously. Therefore I'm consider splitting the collection into two
libraries, the "new/misc" and the "validated/good" one. I would only move
music files from the first one to the second once I'm sure I want to keep
them, and once I've cleaned up and massaged the tags according to my tastes.
I was looking for a way to have QL access two different music libraries,
and found the handling of the QUODLIBET_USERDIR env var in const.py . I
proceeded to thank jkohen for implementing it in issue #599
<http://code.google.com/p/quodlibet/issues/detail?id=599>, but he rather
sternly :-) asked me to reconsider, and ask here.
Is there a better, simpler way to end up with a smaller, cleaner, more
useful music library? Does anyone else share this concern at all?
--
Nicola Larosa - http://www.tekNico.net/
Javier Kohen
Hi all, let me thank you all for this wonderful player. :-)
I have a fairly diverse music collection, as most everyone here I guess,
also in terms of tag data quality, and there's no escaping the GIGO
principle: QL cannot help me, if I don't help it first.
I'd like to improve it, but I don't care about all of it in the same way,
obviously. Therefore I'm consider splitting the collection into two
libraries, the "new/misc" and the "validated/good" one. I would only move
music files from the first one to the second once I'm sure I want to keep
them, and once I've cleaned up and massaged the tags according to my tastes.
I was looking for a way to have QL access two different music libraries,
and found the handling of the QUODLIBET_USERDIR env var in const.py . I
proceeded to thank jkohen for implementing it in issue #599
<http://code.google.com/p/quodlibet/issues/detail?id=599>, but he rather
sternly :-) asked me to reconsider, and ask here.
OK, that's an interesting use case. What I normally do is to have a separate folder for new/misc and navigate to it with the file system view. However that doesn't give you QL's search capabilities, so I always minimize the size of the new/misc collection to at most a handful of albums.
HoverHell
> that doesn't give you QL's search capabilities, so I always minimize the
> size of the new/misc collection to at most a handful of albums.
… unless you use global filter. Which, theoretically, can be switched
between some predefined options (e.g. implement setting it from
external script through QL's control fifo).
eric casteleijn
If you want to use the 'known good', set of music for day to day
playing, and it's all under a separate filesystem path, a solution may
be to just default to the search browser, and use
~dirname=/known/good/path as the default search, and remove it when you
want to act on the whole of your collection.
Again, it depends on how you want to interact with that subset, because
the search browser doesn't give you everything, but in my case it's my
standard browser, and I haven't used any of the others in years.
--
eric casteleijn
https://launchpad.net/~thisfred
Nick B
>
> If you want to use the 'known good', set of music for day to day
> playing, and it's all under a separate filesystem path, a solution may
> be to just default to the search browser, and use
> ~dirname=/known/good/path as the default search, and remove it when you
> want to act on the whole of your collection.
>
I second this as a practical solution (and can't be bothered with
flip-flopping the global filter); in fact you can often go one step
further if this directory name is unique(ish) across default search tags
*and* library structure; for example I have roughly the inverse setup,
with new or yet-to-be-processed ('known bad') files under .../incoming/
and then rely on QL's intuitive free-text search behaviour so that I can
just type:
"incoming jazz"
or, in the case where I want to avoid these files, use:
"&(~dirname=!incoming, genre=jazz)"
Just need to pick a convenient and unique name for that root of your
bad/good tree really.
Nick B
Also, this may be more formally solved when/if Issue 809 gets implemented:
http://code.google.com/p/quodlibet/issues/detail?id=809
Nicola Larosa
>> I'm considering splitting the collection into two libraries, the
>> "new/misc" and the "validated/good" one. I would only move music
>> files from the first one to the second once I'm sure I want to keep
>> them, and once I've cleaned up and massaged the tags according to my
>> tastes.
Eric Casteleijn wrote:
> If you want to use the 'known good', set of music for day to day
> playing, and it's all under a separate filesystem path, a solution
> may be to just default to the search browser, and use
> ~dirname=/known/good/path as the default search, and remove it when
> you want to act on the whole of your collection.
So I still have to segregate music files in distinct filesystem subtrees,
but at least I can have just one QL library, and don't have to use two QL
config sets. Interesting.
> Again, it depends on how you want to interact with that subset,
> because the search browser doesn't give you everything, but in my case
> it's my standard browser, and I haven't used any of the others in
> years.
Well, the file system view keeps things separated by definition (once the
above mentioned segregation is in place), and both the other browsers I
tend to use, Paned Browser and Album List, do support searching, so it
should be workable.
Thanks for the suggestion, I'll try it.
And by the way, again, yes, I should have listened to you two years ago
about QL. :-) But sometimes I can be stubborn like that.
Nicola Larosa
>> I'm considering splitting the collection into two libraries, the
>> files from the first one to the second once I'm sure I want to keep
>> them, and once I've cleaned up and massaged the tags according to
>> my tastes.
Javier Kohen wrote:
> OK, that's an interesting use case.
Thank you. :-)
> What I normally do is to have a separate folder for new/misc and
> navigate to it with the file system view. However that doesn't give
> you QL's search capabilities, so I always minimize the size of the
> new/misc collection to at most a handful of albums.
I would like to do the opposite: put *everything* in new/misc and slowly
and carefully migrate the stuff I most care about to validated/good.
> Let's say you do have separate QL sessions for each collection, what
> do you do with each of them differently? What would be different from
> your point of view to having all the music in one session instead?
It would improve my music enjoyment when in "cherish my good old stuff"
mode, as opposed to being in "discover something new" mode, by letting me
search and navigate through a known good tag data set, and by hiding all
sorts of music I don't yet recognize.
It's kind of creating a boundary between a musical "home" and the rest of
the world, so to speak. :-)
(Expanding the metaphor a bit, I would probably also need an "attic",
where I put music I do know but don't care about, to keep it around just
in case. But that one does not need to be in a QL library.)
Nicola Larosa
>> If you want to use the 'known good', set of music for day to day
>> playing, and it's all under a separate filesystem path, a solution
>> may be to just default to the search browser, and use
>> ~dirname=/known/good/path as the default search, and remove it when
>> you want to act on the whole of your collection.
Nicola Larosa wrote:
> Thanks for the suggestion, I'll try it.
It works like a charm, I'll do this rather than switching between two
different config/libraries. Thanks again. :-)