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1

Questions / Toggle entries in the fields Column Browser? [Workflow/funtionality query]

« on: June 19, 2025, 09:24:59 AM »

So I use primarily the Main Panel for my operations right now, and the "Column Browser" and "Files" more specifically, with just a bunch of fields in both. Pic for general reference, because the specifics aren't important. 



Ok, so in the pic I selected "Akira Yamaoka & Mary", and let's say there were some albums there I wanted to choose, and then I realize that aha, actually, I also want to select ANOTHER artist to add to the mix ("Files Panel" in the "Main Panel"). Problem is, if I then go to the artist field left of the album and track column, then I suddenly lose the selection I already had. The same for whatever things I decided to choose, such as Rating, Tempo, etc (which is why I sometimes have opted to have some fields basically REPEATED in several columns, say one in the far left, and one toward the far end). So it's like the "workflow" for choosing tracks to "add" to the "Main Panel File Panel" is nested, flowcharty, linear, whereas I really would want it to just be less hierarchical, with more toggle options.

I tried using filters, but only one at a time would work, so I tried combining them, but it all just isn't working very smoothly as soon as I want to switch something up. I'm starting to think that mine is a question not of simple functionality, but of workflow, in that maybe I'm going about it wrong in trying to use just "one step" in my workflow, meaning choosing stuff at the "Column Browser" and "sending" them to the "Files Column", or that indeed one step would be enough, but would have to consist of some other function than these two column panels specifically. Maybe utilizing Auto-Playlists, Auto DJ,  and Playlist Mixer functionality would help me, or some other thing yet? Having a couple of tabs for sure I can imagine could help out, but not quite sure not now, honestly. Still I can't seem to get out of my head that just being able to toggle certain things "on the fly" would help immensely.

Any ideas for me?

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Questions / Re: SOLVED (Main Panel Files Section Tracks Header files are all invisible)

« on: June 04, 2025, 08:32:46 AM »

I apologize, my mentalization skills were offline at that moment. ^^ I'm so used to having things look different on my PC that I sometimes forget it can be hard to track for others. I mean in the first image I did right-click on the column thing, but that probably only confused things, instead of clarifying. Did it look like a "left panel" to you?

Yes, I have the column browser control on top, and it is indeed the ONLY place the app will allow me to put it, and this is the case with quite a few of the panels, which surprises me because why should I not be able to put it anywhere, right? But I have nothing on the left here. Do you propose I can put a certain panel on the left side as well?

Hope this picture provides more clarity.

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Questions / Re: SOLVED (Main Panel Files Section Tracks Header files are all invisible)

« on: June 03, 2025, 07:52:47 PM »

TEXT

Sorry for the messy pic, work in progress, bit too much on the screen right now, but there you go. At least things are progressing on my side of things! I did some "custom tag definitions" so that the year of the album of shown before the album name, and some other shenanigans as well, such as "custom sortings" so I quickly can decide how I want the music to be sorted - alphabetically, after ranking, etc.
 
Two things still evade me, though. First, an explanation. I've started using "stars", rating, to describe the intensity of a track, and the "love" button for my favorite tracks. I chose these just because they could be used via the hotkey feature, so it makes it easy to just listen to a song, or an album, and quickly tag it (in this case alt-1-5 and alt-l). But honestly I would prefer if I had TWO kind of "ratings", so that I could rate both "intensity" from 1-5, but also how much I enjoy a song, from say 1-3, or 1-5, but certainly more than just a binary of "love" or "nothing". Tips for how I could make that happen with the use of fields and a hotkey?
 
The second thing is that I would like to have the function to treat EVERY "field" as something I could just turn on and off, in the sense that I would not want to (only) have fields "nested" going from left to right (in the top panel), but just be able to pick and choose tags and then have the tracks which fulfill the criteria come up in the main player.
 
Now, for example, I can decide to add some artists to the "mix" by going to the artist field and hold control and left click, but if I then want to have only the tracks that have intensity/stars 1-2 of this artist, then I would have to go back to the outmost left field in the top, but then I would lose the selection of albums and artists that I already had.
 
This is why I added ANOTHER field with love and rating TO THE RIGHT of the Album choice, but if feel like that's a weird workaround (also the amount of fields is limited to 8 it would seem) to having just a button with love and rating that I could toggle "on" and "off" and thus adding and removing songs in the main player, and doing that with other things as well, would be really nice. Also, what if I wanted intensity 1-2 of one artist, and 2-3 of another? This is an edge case, though, and not as important, but it would be cool to understand whether it could be done.
 
I have yet to explore playlists, but I'm not so much about playlists as such, I would just enjoy throwing together things quickly, and also be able to change around quickly as well, but hey, if I'm just not thinking through things clearly and playlists or grouping is the way to go, then please tell me so.

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Questions / Re: SOLVED (Main Panel Files Section Tracks Header files are all invisible)

« on: May 03, 2025, 11:34:50 PM »

Bonus 3:

There are several different list controls.  I would like to say that they all behave the same but I do not know this for sure.  Sometimes the implementation is different.  The one I am using operates on a delay.  If you hit a letter it will jump to the beginning of that in the list.  This is where the delay is.  I (think?) it is around 3ish seconds.  So you hit 'q' and jump down the q's.  If you hit another letter within the delay period, say 'b' it will add to the first and try to jump to the first listing starting with 'qb'.  If you wait until the delay period is over then it is reset and will jump to the first listing of 'b'.

Oh, hey, you were on the right track because the unresponsiveness isn't actually a question of not being able to search stuff, but a question of being able to do it first after the "delay", a grace period for making other input, but it's ungodly exaggerated. ^^ Like it takes 0.1 second to roll over from "L" to "I" when looking for Linkin Park - what are the 2.9 other seconds for except for pissing me off? Can't remember if I've seen such a long time ANYWHERE, and coming fresh off of split keyboard community where these numbers really are 0.1 seconds and seldom very much more, it makes one ponder...

Do you know if one can adjust this delay period?

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Questions / Re: Main Panel Files Section Tracks Header files are all invibisle

« on: May 03, 2025, 12:44:29 PM »

This is certainly an odd one.

see this useful guide to custom tags.

Thanks for the help.

1. It did some combination of switching around those fields, and changing the skin until some fields started appearing. But at one point even the panel or what you call it where you choose which fields should appear were invisible as well. I'm guessing the weirdness came from some combination of skin usage and the fact that I switch between regular windows theming on windows, and the high contrast one (for purposes of troubleshooting what was going on, because otherwise I use the high contrast one).

2. I will read the guide and come back here. And the way I put the year in front of album names has just been a quirk of mine because when I click on an artist, say Queen, then my mind doesn't go to album names, but rather "early Queen", "later Queen", etc, and I also enjoy listening to artist with their "chronological discography" in mind, if that makes sense? And when I have another column/field with the "year" in it, then I just see the year and have to click on every year entry to see which album was released that year, whereas I just want to see the album with the year directly. Perhaps you have another solution for this that would be nice for me?

Bonus 3: When I go to the "artist" column, if I press say "Q", then I get down to the artists that begin with the letter "Q", but THEN when I press ANOTHER letter, I think I should go to that letter, but in fact NOTHING happens, until scroll back to "All", and press another letter from there. What does this depend on? A similar thing happens in the fields below as well, but it becomes even weirder, because pressing letters goes to the correct one SOMETIMES; and then it refuses to go anywhere, except no matter which letter I press it goes to the top of the topmost entry of the album or title or whichever I'm currently sorting after which I'm already at. So weird! Any clue what's going on?

4. Super minor problem, but if I press "L" on the artist column, I don't go to Lara Fabian, because she is apparently "Fabian Lara", and every time I go into the "Custom Sorting" setting (which I NEVER touched, yet there are like 30 artists there that are sometimes SUPER weirdly sorted, including the somewhat logical "Fabian, Lara") and remove the custom sortings and apply and save, it works, but next time I open the problem, the custom sorting is back! Any tips?

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Questions / Re: Main Panel Files Section Tracks Header files are all invibisle

« on: May 03, 2025, 12:18:47 PM »

Just a random shot in the dark about issue # 1.  It is easy to see this is a custom skin.
It might be possible the author forgot to skin this section so it appears "blank".
I am curious to know if you still encounter this problem with a different skin enabled?

Dude, I swear to God I tried switching skins several times, and also switched between the High Contrast Mode and the regular one that Windows uses because I thought the high contrast one although not seemingly affecting how things looked in MusicBee could do that anyway somehow, and I was THIS close to writing that I've tried switching skins already because I thought that this would be the first question that came up, but I'm glad I thought I'd give it another shot, just because, and this time it worked!

I guess this is just one of those things where it actually works to restart the computer for the third time, for some reason. Thanks man.

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Questions / SOLVED (Main Panel Files Section Tracks Header files are all invisible)

« on: May 02, 2025, 09:18:06 AM »

So I'm new to Musicbee (migrated from another animal software - Mediamonkey), and I feel like I've tried everything five times over, but cannot for the life of me understand why the marked section in question where the tracks are (in this case from the album "2009 - Every Woman In Me") turn up invisible EVERY TIME. If I try the album and tracks header, for example, then everything turns up alright.

Bonus question - a lot of my music now is unsorted, because I tagged stuff manually in Mediamonkey. I don't want to use any automatic kind of tagging, but want to be able to use my custom tagging that I've already did PLUS make sure that the custom tags STAY tagged when I change software, reinstall windows, etc. Is there a way to make sure that the tags I do are like on the file level itself, and could I protect myself from human error of some kind if I managed to like "tag automatically" all my files and thus overwriting my custom tagging?