CaveatI've thought about this question much longer than I meant to, but I also can't be bothered editing it any more now.
So I apologise in advance if it sounds a bit ranty or condescending.
Library can indicate the concept or an index of an assembly of music, the actual music files, or some vague reference to either.
Playlist can indicate a single file that only contains an index of songs, or it can refer to an assembly of actual audio files, or it can be some vague reference to either.
I don't see the current terminology as an issue, and I think your definitions are broader than intended for MusicBee.
PlaylistA
Playlist is a single file containing a list of audio files (e.g. a .pls or .m3u file). Anyone using it to refer to the original files contained within it is using the word incorrectly.
The term
Playlist pre-dates computerised music and is now used in every media application, mobile app, or streaming web site, so changing it would be out of the question.
LibraryLibrary is a common term in any application that stores information about a collection of items, physical or digital. The analogy of going to a physical library and choosing from a broad selection of books remains a good one. You could search for a book by its title, author, subject etc., just as there are many ways to view and choose from your music. I don't think anyone could come up with another term that explained the concept more clearly.
Within MusicBee (and on the forum) its use is somewhat fuzzy, but I think the term should only apply in the conceptual sense.
To clarify the distinction, consider this example.
If all of your files are stored in the folder "C:\Music", some people might refer to that folder as containing their "library". It's certainly true that if you look at an album in
Album and Tracks view, each row (i.e. track)
will correspond to a file on a disk somewhere (ignoring cue sheets etc.). However, MusicBee will also let you browse your Library by
Artist, or
Composer, or
Year or
Genre, or any number of other criteria that have no relationship to the folder structure or files on your computer.
So while someone could reasonably say "I have 1,000 songs in my library" and use it to mean the number of files, no such relationship can be inferred if they say "I have 100 artists in my library".
For this reason - to use one of your own examples - instructing someone to "copy their library" is confusing, but it's the incorrect use of the word that's confusing, not the word itself.
etc.Phred mentioned the term
database, but that should only ever refer to the actual
MusicBeeLibrary.mbl file, since that is a literal description of it.
For the majority of questions asked on the forum where people have trouble understanding the replies given, I'd argue those questions are being asked by casual users who don't necessarily have a long history of working with computers and digital files. If there's any confusion there, changing the names of things won't make it any less so.
People migrating from iTunes seem to be more likely to have questions about the "library". I've never used iTunes but I think it must have been much more restrictive about where your music files were stored. Does it require all songs to be "imported" before they can be played? So iTunes users probably never had to worry about such things when they were using it.
Finally, MusicBee is obviously a very powerful program but with great power comes great respon... er... complexity. It's come a long way over many years thanks to Steven's amazing work and willingness to listen to all kinds of feedback, but it still has some way to go before it's truly accessible to everyone in the way say iTunes or MediaPlayer are.
Topic: Does anybody know what 'playlist' and 'library' mean? (Read 4794 times)