I was hoping for a web form or email but since this thread existed I thought I'd register anyway just to express how impressed I was with musicbee after using it last year. It's snappy and easy to use — basically a more useful iTunes. It's obvious that a lot of effort went into creating it.
Now, I usually express gratitude to software projects by sharing feedback and first impressions, because that's what I'd value. That said I'm aware this might be all the same to this project due to its already large user base, and I wrote this while I used it (in 2023), so it might not have been the latest version. If any seasoned user thinks any of the following observations are worth mentioning in some more "official" channel then feel free to point it out, but here's my "thanks, and here's some things I ran into in my first use":
My use case was to organize thousands of files that had all been shoved into a nonsense folder structure by Windows chkdsk after an epic NTFS failure.
Most things in the application worked just fine, so I'll just mention those that didn't (or that I couldn't make work):
* Could not exclusively select albums with a dynamic (computed) track count of more than 1 (for organizing only these files — I want to avoid hundreds of folders containing one file each, since I'd rather just put them all in an "unsorted" folder)
* Could not sort albums on dynamic track count (albums were in seemingly random order when using a custom sorting on "track count", leading me to believe it's a static property)
* Could not select multiple albums in the side-pane (the only view that actually had the above mentioned sorting capability)
* Could not select multiple rows in the file organizer window (shift-clicking). Deselecting 100 files becomes impractical.
* When customizing columns in the song list, several concepts are mixed together: "fields" (tags/metadata) and file system properties like path, folder and file name. Very difficult to know whether "album track count" is a dynamic (computed) property or a static metadata field stored inside each file. Not knowing this makes it difficult to use sorting and filtering properly.
* Not possible to group by absolute file path (excluding file name). Seems it's only possible to group by parent folder name, making it impossible to differentiate between files in distinct folders that have the same folder name.
* After removing items in a "Edit > Find" result by sending them to rescan and accepting the suggested removal, they're still visible in the result with no obvious way to refresh the results, other than to perform a new Find.
Some playback issues (less important for my use case of organization):
* Playback of an inaccessible song (marked with an X in the queue) refuses to retry accessing the file even when I try to skip to the song manually, after having made the song accessible. This refusal to retry only makes sense when the skipping is done automatically, to avoid infinite retries. Clicking the song in the queue works, though -- just not with the Next Track button.
* Right-clicking the Music library in the side pane and once again selecting "play library shuffled" will not repopulate the queue with new (now accessible) songs. It's now impossible to play the library shuffled even though the files have been made accessible.
* If I manually click two items in the queue, thus marking them as accessible again, and then shuffle play my entire library, then only the songs I clicked will be enqueued — over and over again. No sign of the rest of the library. I have to restart the application to work around this.
Right now the application is effectively saying "there's something wrong here, but even if you fix it it won't make any difference". The most obvious solution to this problem from my perspective would be to flag each action as either user initiated or automatic, thereby making it possible to apply sanity checks only to automatic actions.
Minor UI issues:
* It's unclear that the top left menu button is actually two separate buttons.
* It's unclear how to exit the mini player, since the top left menu is now gone; the right-click context menu does not give any clues.
* It's not obvious how "play Library shuffled" interacts with the Shuffle playback button; it rather appears that "play Library shuffled" means "populate queue randomly and play it non-shuffled". A little difficult to wrap my head around. Also, non-shuffled and Auto DJ result in the same queue in this case, which I also can't explain. Note that I haven't actually used the application for serious playback of music — I've mostly played around with it to see how it's been designed.
Once again, just a compilation of observations because I like analyzing UI, etc., and my way of saying thanks. To be extra clear, I wrote all of the above while using it and I'm not expecting anyone to act on any of this, but if experienced users think any of it seems worth posting separately somewhere feel free to suggest it.
I was able to rescue most of the messed up directories thanks to musicbee 👌
PS. I got the impression it's tradition to mention CAPTCHA: it made me concede that spiders are insects 😭😭