I think most people will find it annoying to have ratings continually flashing as you move the mouse. I dont see this as inconsistent
Although it's hard for me to imagine that this might irritate someone) it would be nice if the forum participants spoke out on this topic, maybe really)
While I did +1 your wish a while back, reconsidering now I believe that the flashing of stars when accidentally hovering over that column would probably indeed irritate me.
Have you tried it? It might not be as disruptive as you imagine.
Lost of GUI elements in almost every program already change state when you hover over them, with so called
hot tracking.
Menus, buttons, tabs, links etc.
The Windows Start menu and Taskbar? Everything uses hot tracking.
Calculator? Jiggle your mouse and it lights up like the end of
Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
Steam? Every game tile and list item uses it.
Word/Outlook? Every ribbon/button/email/style etc. uses it.
So having the rating stars use it shouldn't be more annoying than what people are already use to from every other program.
If anything, it highlights the fact that MusicBee doesn't provide enough of that kind of visual feedback - everything is a bit static.
(Steven, I'd be curious to see a version of MusicBee with hot tracking enabled - the interface is comprised almost entirely of lists, so it should be an easy thing to test)
Getting back to the original request, if it is deemed irritating, I have a couple of ideas.
It could be made optional and tied to the existing
Enable direct editing of tags in the main panel setting.
Clicking the rating stars
is directly editing a tag value, so strictly speaking it already shouldn't be possible to change the track rating without that checked.
Alternatively, implement as per OP's request, but add a slight delay that the mouse has to hover over the rating stars for before they change to an editable state.
This avoids the need for double clicking but also means nothing will highlight if you're just moving your mouse over the column on the way to selecting something else. It should also prevent accidental rating of tracks.
This could be implemented two ways:
* either per track, where hovering over one track's rating column for 100-200ms enables editing for that track (i.e. how it works now if you select a track)
* or for the entire column, where hovering over the rating column of any track for around 500ms enables editing for all tracks (i.e. how it works now if you select all tracks).
The longer delay for the second option reflects the fact it will make a larger visual impact and helps avoid triggering it accidentally.
Sofocl, there is a clunky workaround that works now if you just want to be able to quickly tag a bunch of files one after the other.
First select all the files (
Ctrl+A) to display their rating stars, then hold down the
Ctrl key while you click on the stars to rate them.
This will stop the other tracks from being deselected when you click one.