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

[aVataR_eHYeh]

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?

[tjinc]

Welcome to the forum aVataR_eHYeh,

This is certainly an odd one.
The only way I can imagine you can achieve this is to disable all displayed fields (in the Tracks view). To check this, right click anywhere in the gap just above your highlighted area (and below the column browser), and then click on 'Select Displayed Fields...'.
I am guessing that the 'Selected Fields' column will be empty - if so drag a few fields over from the left column.
(If that is not the case then let us know and we can have another think.)


While I love a bonus, your question is hard to answer without more information:

I have never used MediaMonkey, so do you know whether the custom tags you created there are saved to the files (or are they maybe stored only in the MediaMonkey database)?
If they are written to file then you will be able to use MusicBee's custom tags functionality to map a field to these tags - see this useful guide to custom tags.
If you are not sure whether they are written to file you can use MusicBee's Tag Inspector to check:
   Right-click on any track (one that you know has these custom data) > Edit > select 'Tag Inspector' (from the menu bar)
This will open a list of all tags that are stored in the files along with their values.


And just a quick comment as you seem concerned about accidental auto-tagging - If you tag your album names beginning with a year, I think it extremely unlikely that any automatic search function will work. There is no such album as "2009 - Every Woman In Me" so there will be no matches (no idea why you might have done that).

[Pickles7853]

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?

[aVataR_eHYeh]

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.

[aVataR_eHYeh]

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?

[Pickles7853]

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'.

[tjinc]

1. Good spot Pickles!
@aVataR_eHYeh - what skin were you using when you were seeing this issue. Is it repeatable? Is it something the skin's author should be made aware of?

2.

Perhaps you have another solution for this that would be nice for me?

It is quite hard for anyone to offer a solution other than to a specific question and/or without full knowledge of what you are trying to achieve. You might want to play around a little more - MusicBee is extremely powerful software and almost infinitely configurable, so I am sure that you can find a better solution than prepending the year to the album name. But of course it is your collection so entirely your choice.

What I will say is that, as with any database, different data should be stored in their own distinct fields - e.g. the release year ought to be saved in the <Year> field. This will give you much better control over how you manipulate and display your library - you can sort by the <Year> field if that is what you want (and it is a common thing to do).
If you really like seeing the year and album title in a single field then you can use MusicBee's fantastic 'virtual tag' functions to combine the two bits of data into one field for display purposes. I won't go into details here as it is probably for another topic and, as you are new to MusicBee, I don't want to try and force you to run before you can walk (you can always do a search for "virtual tag" on the Wiki, this forum or on the MusicBee Google search here.

4. I do agree that MusicBee does appear to automatically populate some custom sorting for Artists. I'm not sure why and I have never really looked into it - I have just deleted them. Not sure why you might be having trouble with this.
To delete:
    Edit Preferences > Sorting/Grouping > Edit Custom Sort Values
Remove the values with the '-' button on the right.
    Save > Save
That should do it - I don't see them coming back.

[aVataR_eHYeh]

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?

[Pickles7853]

I have never seen a setting for this in the preferences.  There might (really digging here) be an entry in one of the configuration files which saves settings between sessions, but it also might be a hard coded value.  No way to know without a lot of digging.  You might see if adding an A-Z bar might be better.  I think they can be customized but, since I do not use one, I am not 100% sure.

[aVataR_eHYeh]

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.

[Pickles7853]

There is no contrast between the different menus/ areas/ sections of your skin so I cannot see what is going on.  For the second thing: In your main panel, are you using a column browser control?  Because this is what I would try.  If you add one you can configure it to be horizontal across the top.  You could choose an artist from the left panel.  And then in the column browser start filtering.  You can add/ remove fields like rating, heart, etc etc.  If you are already using one I apologize... I cant tell.

[aVataR_eHYeh]

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.

[Pickles7853]

Do you propose I can put a certain panel on the left side as well?

Not specifically no.  From your description the column browser just sounded like the best option so that was the main thing.

Nothing I can think of matches what you are describing.  Though it might be better to separate artist/ album from the filtering.  So yeah... maybe adding a library explorer or similar control in the left panel wouldn't be the worst idea.  Then you could remove artist/ album (and duplicate fields) from the column browser in the main panel.  Just thinking out loud.  Wouldn't hurt to try it to see if it's any better than your current layout.  At least it would isolate them from the filtering process.