O HAI Tagalicious 1.2b2

[simX]

Hey all --

The moment you've all been waiting for! A beta of 1.2! (No, you
haven't missed 1.2b1, that was an internal beta only.) PLEASE READ
THIS ENTIRE ANNOUNCEMENT BEFORE DOWNLOADING AND LAUNCHING 1.2b2!
Download URL is at the very bottom of this message.

Here are all the major changes:

• now supports Album Artist, Track Number, and Track Count!
• allow batch changes of selected tags via the details pane, by
showing aggregated tags for all selected songs in the details pane
• show pixel count on old and new album art so you can better judge
whether you want the new art
• add preference to search for lyrics and art using existing tags in
iTunes even if Tagalicious couldn't identify the song
• fix the most frequent crash from 1.1.2 that occurred when searching
for tags
• read the audio from up to 2 files on disk at once, up from 1 in
previous versions (makes Tagalicious run up to twice as fast!)
• don't suggest truncated lyrics!


IMPORTANT NOTES:

1. The database file that stores your track information (the
"database.sql" file) needs to be upgraded to be compatible with this
version of Tagalicious. This should happen AUTOMATICALLY on the first
launch of 1.2b2. Before launching 1.2b2, though, please launch 1.1.2
and take note of the state of some your songs (are there some tagged?,
are some updated?, note down some tags for a few specific song
files). Then, launch 1.2b2 and make sure EVERYTHING looks the same!
If something goes wrong, all your songs will be reset to untagged.
PLEASE LET ME KNOW if this happens!

2. Tagalicious 1.2b2 tags your songs up to twice as fast as previous
versions of Tagalicious, because it simultaneously reads the audio
data from two song files on your disk at once. However, this comes at
a cost of increased disk access and increased CPU usage, so it may
cause your computer to slow down. PLEASE COMMENT on whether your
computer still feels responsive while running Tagalicious 1.2b2!
Also, let me know whether you have an SSD or whether you have a
traditional hard disk drive (if you know the difference; if not,
that's OK).

3. When you select multiple songs in the center pane, the details
pane will now reflect the aggregate tag values of all the applicable
selected songs. If the same tag differs between any of the selected
songs, you'll see "Multiple Values" in place of the tag value. Using
this feature, you can select multiple songs from the same album and
batch change the selected tag to transfer to iTunes. The Tracks menu
had the ability to do this in 1.1.2, but now the details pane gains
this ability, and it has the added improvement of actually showing you
the aggregate tags. This is a bit confusing, however, so LET ME KNOW
if the new behavior you see in the details pane MAKES SENSE.

4. Tagalicious 1.2b2 is feature-complete. Everything that we wanted
to include in this release is present in this beta. Any further
changes before release will simply be bugfixes. However, if there is
a minor feature you'd like included in this version, please don't
hesitate to let me know!


Other spiffy changes:

• automatically select new art only if the pixel count is greater than
the old art in both dimensions
• rearranged the bottom button bar in the main window and the artwork
picker window
• added info text to the bottom of the main window so you can see at a
glance how many items there are in the list and how many are selected
• header in details pane now stays fixed when scrolling
• default window size is much larger (but if you've used Tagalicious
before, you won't notice this)
• add "size" and "bit rate" columns to list view
• when sorting by album, secondary sort order will be track number;
when sorting by artist, secondary sort order will be album and
tertiary sort order will be track number
• click behavior in details pane is changed: clicking on a specific
tag will select that tag, clicking on the tag row label will toggle
the selection (as it used to do)
• speed up drawing of details pane
• when marking a song as untagged, make sure the cached results are
thrown out (so retagging will get new tags if there are any)
• numerous subtle UI improvements


Tagalicious 1.2b2 download URL: http://files.thelittleappfactory.com/tagalicious/Tagalicious_1.2b2.zip
. This beta will expire after March 28.


Thanks for all your help, as usual!

-- Simone

[Andy]

When it launches, it fails to locate my itunes library

--
Andy Harris
417-861-6661

[ahar...@gmail.com]

Looking mostly great. It's still guilty of suggesting truncated lyrics, though:

[simX]

What's the error message that Tagalicious displays? "Failed to load
your song database" or "Failed to load your music library"?

-- Simone

[simX]

Hrm, looks like that's a different cause than the typical case of
truncated lyrics, but I think I can fix this one too!

-- Simone

On Mar 24, 6:55 pm, "aharp...@gmail.com" <aharp...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Looking mostly great.  It's still guilty of suggesting truncated lyrics, though:
>

>  PastedGraphic-1.png
> 300KViewDownload

[Andy]

Failed to load your music library....sorry!

--
Andy Harris
417-861-6661

[simX]

Find your iTunes Music Library folder, and locate the file named
"iTunes Music Library.xml" file. Move it to the trash (don't delete
it yet!). Launch iTunes, create a empty playlist, quit iTunes, and
then relaunch iTunes. Now try relaunching Tagalicious 1.2b2. Does it
still say "Failed to load your music library"?

-- Simone

[Andy]

Where do I find this file?

--
Andy Harris
417-861-6661

[simX]

99% of the time, it's located inside the folder ~/Music/iTunes/ (where
~ is your account's home folder, accessed by choosing the [Go -->
Home] menu item). You can customize the location, though. If you
don't see it there, go to iTunes, choose the [iTunes -->
Preferences...] menu item, switch to the "Advanced" tab, and it'll
tell you where your iTunes music library folder is. The "iTunes Music
Library.xml" file should be inside that folder.

-- Simone

[Andy]

Found it, that cured the problem!  Thanks!

--
Andy Harris
417-861-6661

[Sean Purdon]

Hey,

First time user here, so forgive me a few words on the general app before I answer those questions directly relevant to this update.  The first thing I noticed is the interface: it's really good, and blends into OS X well.  Thumbs up for that.  The only interface quibble I have is the embossed text in the top left corner of the tag info panel when multiple songs are selected (the bit that says 'x songs').  When I first saw this, I thought it had to be an active element of some sort, so I tried clicking on it to view specific tag info on one of the selected songs, or right clicking for a drop down list...obviously neither worked, but that was my first thought.

The other comment I have is about the tags themselves.  Obviously whatever source you have isn't perfect, and that's fine.  I did run into a lot of problems with compilation albums (defaulted to re-tagging to the original album/single) and multiple-disc albums (on quite a few, it wanted to put 'disc x' into the album title, rather than using the same name and setting the disc value appropriately).  Similarly, the default tags had a tendency to try to re-tag my trance albums with 'feat x' in the title instead of the artist tag, but that's life.  Oh, and it has an irritating habit of tagging everything in sight as 'Rock' :P

What that did get me thinking of, though, is implementing some sort of tag filter in the options.  Something along the line of 'do not automatically select tags which contain the following words:' would appear useful to me (so I could put 'disc' and 'feat' into this field to fix most of my tagging problems); but I'm not sure how many other people would use this.

The other general feature-ish thing I'd like to see is the option to add columns for artwork and lyrics to the main list-view display.  These don't need to display the artwork or lyrics themselves, just the flag that tells me if they've been edited/retagged or not so I can glance at them before okaying the change.

Anyway, to finally answer the questions (I tested by telling it to check for tags on ~4.5k songs at once):

Disc access didn't seem to be a problem at all, although I'm on a SSD so I'm not surprised.  CPU use was, however: I was using up 100% of both cores the whole time - nice multithreading! - and that made the system a bit jerky until I ran renice +1 on the appropriate pid.

My internet had incredible problems connecting/loading while the update was running, although unfortunately I can't 100% confirm that was due to tagalicious, as I was in a lecture theatre at uni during the test run, and it could have been the wifi playing up.  I suspect something - be it constant disk reads, heavily multithreaded internet access, or CPU use - was a contributing factor, though.

The multiple songs details pain seems very intuitive to me; I like it.  I would like, however, if it was made clearer that you could select old blank tags.  While this makes sense, I didn't realise you could do it for a while.  Maybe a faint grey outline or something?

Overall, though, I'm very impressed :)

sean

[Sean Purdon]

If you select a group of songs which have been tagged and for which you have sent the tags to itunes, the button to 'check all for tags' appears even though it will not have any effect unless you first mark the selected tracks as untagged.

I suggest the button be either marked as inactive, or replaced with one to mark the selected tracks as untagged.

[Damien Everett]

Really nice experience with this so far, I did have crashes when I try to use the apple / number keys, theres a lag in response then if I choose another option it often crashes, not sure if its due to using a large music library (11k+ songs).

It still feels somewhat awkward going though a large library and checking / retagging things and wanting to use custom genres, and slow going with the key commands which feel a bit non-intuitive and don't fall under the fingers that easily.

My main suggestion for improvement would be "right click pop-up menus" implemented throughout with contextual options with both the album cover view and list view:
click on album cover and send to itunes, click on genre text to change genre etc.

great tool over all though, loving it!

[Sean Purdon]

When I re-opened the app today, after sleeping my computer, it seemed to have lost the connection to the iTunes library.  All album artwork was showing as missing in the 'original' section of the info pane, and when I tried to 'send tags to itunes', I got an error.

Quitting and restarting tagalicious fixed the problem.

[Damien Everett]

A "play track" option would be awesome, ie hit spacebar and hear the selected track

[simX]

Sean: Thanks for the detailed feedback. Much appreciated! Responses
to your specific feedback follows.

1. Embossed song count in details pane header: I'll think about how
to make it look less button-y, but not sure how to make it more
obvious that it's just informational. If I remove the capsule around
it, it's really non-obvious that multiple songs are represented, which
is why I tried to grab the user's attention more.

2. Compilation problems: yeah, currently, even though an identical
song can belong to multiple albums, Tagalicious enforces the first
result it finds. I'm planning on fixing this for the next major
release, but it requires major restructuring of the code.

3. Multiple disc albums getting "disc x" in the album title and song
titles getting "featuring x": not for 1.2, 'cause I want to make sure
that errors associated with this don't cause problems with other
songs, but I'll see about 1.2.1.

4. Genre always being tagged as "Rock": sadly, this is a problem with
our database. In 1.0.x it was even more irritating because the
database likes to tag with multiple genres, like "Rock/Pop" or
"Alternative/Pop" which COMPLETELY defeats the purpose of genre tags.
Not much we can do about this at this time.

5. Tag filter: that's a very interesting way to get around the
problem. I may consider this solution for 1.2.1, but no guarantees it
will appear. It's definitely better than the other solution that a
lot of people want: being able to set the "after tagging,
automatically select" preference on a per-tag basis.

6. Adding artwork/lyrics columns to list view. Not for 1.2, but this
is marked as probably coming in 1.2.1. Excellent suggestion!

7. CPU usage: have you tried the current release version of
Tagalicious, 1.1.2? Does it have the same problem? I suspect your
computer is getting bogged down because it's reading from disk so fast
that it's trying to retrieve tags for tens (hundreds?) of songs at a
time. Maybe the solution to this problem is setting a limit on THAT,
too. (Currently, I leave it up to the system to decide whether to
judge how many simultaneous lookups it can handle.)

8. Internet problems: please test in a location with more stable
internet, and report if you continue to have problems. May be related
to #6 -- Tagalicious may be initiating way too many simultaneous
lookups.

9. Selecting old blank tags: there *is* a faint gray outline when you
hover over the tag row. Does it not appear for you?

10. "Check All for Tags" button being enabled for already-updated
songs: I can't reproduce this. Whenever I select any group of songs
that contains only updated songs, the "Send to iTunes" button is
visible but disabled. If you have any *untagged* songs selected along
with it, the "Check for Tags" button is enabled, but the "Send to
iTunes" button should still be disabled. I know the activated buttons
don't directly correspond to which songs are shown in the details
pane, but I figured it'd be best to be as liberal as possible with the
buttons so that people can just select a bunch of songs and not have
to weed out the already-updated songs before they can tag a bunch of
songs at once. Does this make sense, or is it way too confusing?

11. Can you reproduce the "lost the connection to iTunes library"
bug? Does this consistently happen after you put your computer to
sleep and wake it up again?




Damien: Also thanks for your feedback. Responses to your specific
points also follows.

1. Crashes when trying to use the "apple / number keys": I think you
mean using the Cmd-1 or Cmd-2 keyboard shortcuts to toggle the tag
selection. I can reproduce this! Will fix in 1.2b3. However, I
haven't received any crash reports whatsoever for 1.2b3. Has the
crash reporter not been showing up in Tagalicious on the next
relaunch? Or have you just not been submitting them? I can easily
search crash reports by version, so if you see the crash reporter,
please use it and then post a note here! Thanks.

2. "still feels somewhat awkward going though a large library and
checking / retagging things and wanting to use custom genres": I'm not
sure exactly what you mean, here. Do you want a sort of song-by-song
view instead of the three pane view? Or is this a problem
specifically with the genre tags and wanting to be able to put in
custom ones? Both of these are potential features that might make it
into the next major version, but no guarantees. If this isn't what
you're talking about, please elaborate a little more, thanks.

3. Key commands being non-intuitive: what would you suggest? I don't
think keyboard shortcuts with letters makes any sense because we'd
have to customize them for each language, and it would put them all
over the map. With Cmd-1, Cmd-2, Cmd-3, etc., the keyboard shortcuts
are predictable and useful, I think.

4. Contextual menus: 95% probability of showing up in 1.2.1; I agree,
those would be really nice.

5. Play Track option: I am really reluctant to put something like
this in. There are so many things that people might want to do with
tracks, that we could fill a whole menu with them. I figured that the
best way to accommodate all these possibilities was to add the "Reveal
in iTunes" menu item, and then users could do whatever they wanted
with the song at that point. It means an extra keyboard shortcut for
you, but you can accomplish what you want with Cmd-Shift-R and then
Space. I realize that playing a track is probably the most common
action, so I may rethink this if *everybody* wants this feature, but
for now I'm gonna leave it at just the "Reveal in iTunes" menu item.




aharpole: Fixed the truncated lyrics problem you reported, look for
the fix in 1.2b3!

[Damien Everett]

>
> Damien: Also thanks for your feedback. Responses to your specific
> points also follows.
>
> 1. Crashes when trying to use the "apple / number keys": I think you
> mean using the Cmd-1 or Cmd-2 keyboard shortcuts to toggle the tag
> selection. I can reproduce this! Will fix in 1.2b3. However, I
> haven't received any crash reports whatsoever for 1.2b3. Has the
> crash reporter not been showing up in Tagalicious on the next
> relaunch? Or have you just not been submitting them? I can easily
> search crash reports by version, so if you see the crash reporter,
> please use it and then post a note here! Thanks.

Hi, the crash submitter has showed up once after a CMD key crash and I submitted a brief report, although I tried using these keys a few times also crashing (with no crash report window coming up) so I stopped trying to use them.

> 2. "still feels somewhat awkward going though a large library and
> checking / retagging things and wanting to use custom genres": I'm not
> sure exactly what you mean, here. Do you want a sort of song-by-song
> view instead of the three pane view? Or is this a problem
> specifically with the genre tags and wanting to be able to put in
> custom ones? Both of these are potential features that might make it
> into the next major version, but no guarantees. If this isn't what
> you're talking about, please elaborate a little more, thanks.

I couldn't actually get the custom genre settings to work at all and seemed to be forced to use either the original genre or the one the database suggested, when I wanted to use a different one.

> 3. Key commands being non-intuitive: what would you suggest? I don't
> think keyboard shortcuts with letters makes any sense because we'd
> have to customize them for each language, and it would put them all
> over the map. With Cmd-1, Cmd-2, Cmd-3, etc., the keyboard shortcuts
> are predictable and useful, I think.

Sorry if I was unclear, the key commands are intuitive but I found the hard to work with (ergonomically).

If I wanted to tag just with a mouse on a large monitor I had to keep moving the mouse long distances all over the screen ( to the album, to the tags then down to the update tags button etc).

The keyboard commands were kind of difficult to get my fingers around, if I was using cmd number keys then cmd update I would need both hands on the keyboard, then to go to the next song I would have to move to the arrow keys or take my hand off to use the mouse. As such I was kind of moving my hands all over the keyboard to different positions, which seemed to slow down the process.

It took a while to work out a somewhat efficient way to tag songs quickly, which I think involved using the mouse and CMD U, although when I was sitting back watching a movie and tagging things on a second monitor in the boring parts just with the mouse, it was quite slow going, which is why I thought contextual menu popups would be handy.

> 4. Contextual menus: 95% probability of showing up in 1.2.1; I agree,
> those would be really nice.
>
> 5. Play Track option: I am really reluctant to put something like
> this in. There are so many things that people might want to do with
> tracks, that we could fill a whole menu with them. I figured that the
> best way to accommodate all these possibilities was to add the "Reveal
> in iTunes" menu item, and then users could do whatever they wanted
> with the song at that point. It means an extra keyboard shortcut for
> you, but you can accomplish what you want with Cmd-Shift-R and then
> Space. I realize that playing a track is probably the most common
> action, so I may rethink this if *everybody* wants this feature, but
> for now I'm gonna leave it at just the "Reveal in iTunes" menu item.

Playing the track in the program would be great, as I have a lot of old music with bad or no tags, some just with the song title that I can't remember what the song was.

When for instance 2 genre options came up it would be awesome to easily preview the track and confirm how I would categorise it. Jumping back and forth from iTunes would work but also would make things a bit less easy to do quickly?

Initially I thought just using spacebar to start / stop the selected track would be good, but perhaps also seeing a song progress bar to jump to different points would be even more awesome.

Mind you this is stuff perhaps I should do in iTunes although having that feature in Tagalicious would be really handy in my opinion.

Anyway I hope this feedback is useful!
Good luck with it all!

[simX]

Damien:

> > 2.  "still feels somewhat awkward going though a large library and
> > checking / retagging things and wanting to use custom genres": I'm not
> > sure exactly what you mean, here.  Do you want a sort of song-by-song
> > view instead of the three pane view?  Or is this a problem
> > specifically with the genre tags and wanting to be able to put in
> > custom ones?  Both of these are potential features that might make it
> > into the next major version, but no guarantees.  If this isn't what
> > you're talking about, please elaborate a little more, thanks.
>
> I couldn't actually get the custom genre settings to work at all and seemed to be forced to use either the original genre or the one the database suggested, when I wanted to use a different one.

There is no "custom genre" feature in Tagalicious right now. You're
right, you're forced to use either the original genre or the one the
database suggests. We're planning on adding custom tag support in a
future update, but it will take a while to add that feature in.

> Sorry if I was unclear, the key commands are intuitive but I found the hard to work with (ergonomically).
>
> If I wanted to tag just with a mouse on a large monitor I had to keep moving the mouse long distances all over the screen ( to the album, to the tags then down to the update tags button etc).
>
> The keyboard commands were kind of difficult to get my fingers around, if I was using cmd number keys then cmd update I would need both hands on the keyboard, then to go to the next song I would have to move to the arrow keys or take my hand off to use the mouse. As such I was kind of moving my hands all over the keyboard to different positions, which seemed to slow down the process.
>
> It took a while to work out a somewhat efficient way to tag songs quickly, which I think involved using the mouse and CMD U, although when I was sitting back watching a movie and tagging things on a second monitor in the boring parts just with the mouse, it was quite slow going, which is why I thought contextual menu popups would be handy.

Understood! Contextual menus are indeed a handy feature, I'll most
likely be adding them in.

> Playing the track in the program would be great, as I have a lot of old music with bad or no tags, some just with the song title that I can't remember what the song was.
>
> When for instance 2 genre options came up it would be awesome to easily preview the track and confirm how I would categorise it. Jumping back and forth from iTunes would work but also would make things a bit less easy to do quickly?
>
> Initially I thought just using spacebar to start / stop the selected track would be good, but perhaps also seeing a song progress bar to jump to different points would be even more awesome.
>
> Mind you this is stuff perhaps I should  do in iTunes although having that feature in Tagalicious would be really handy in my opinion.

This is exactly why I'm hesitant to add this to Tagalicious. I add
rudimentary preview support, and then people want a song progress bar,
and rewind/fast-forward buttons, and then if it doesn't replicate the
functionality of iTunes exactly people might get confused, etc., etc.
I hate reinventing the wheel, especially if it basically forces me to
mimic functionality of future iTunes releases, too. For now, you'll
have to go through iTunes to preview the track, but the [Track -->
Show in iTunes] menu item should mitigate some of the annoyance.

> Anyway I hope this feedback is useful!
> Good luck with it all!

Absolutely useful, please keep giving feedback!

-- Simone