Improvements to CD ripping, device sync and Auto DJ

[Antcodd]

Hi,

Hopefully these haven't been requested before (I did a search first but it's hard to think of decent keywords that don't show up all over the place). Sorry if I should have separated them, I didn't want to spam 3 threads at once. Some of these I noticed in general use, and some during a (very brief) comparison for a Human Computer Interaction course assignment on music management systems.

CD Ripping:

It would be nice if it was possible to select columns to display in the Rip CD dialog like with other library views so it is possible to add more tags (e.g. composer). It would also be great to be able to rip to multiple formats (for example lossless and MP3) as this would allow me to completely replace DBPowerAmp for everything other than big batch rips.

Device Syncing:

An option to organize but not rename files when device syncing would be great. Because of the lack of this I had to delete all my music from my phone and re-sync the whole lot because I couldn't set up MusicBee to use the same renaming settings as Windows Media Player. I also wonder if there should be a link to the setting for changing character substitutions - when I was looking for it I knew I had seen it somewhere but it took me a while to find it (to the point I can't actually find it now).

Also, there is a nasty usability issue/bug (at least with 1.2.4176) where when syncing I can't view the contents of the device - the folder updating just hangs. It would also be nice to have that list progressively filled (with one of those status bar progress thingies that are used elsewhere) rather than needing to wait for a re-scan every time the device is opened.

It would also be nice to have something along the lines of the sync list Windows Media Player has, where it is possible to see how much space will be used/free and set up a list of songs to syncing before doing the actual sync.

Auto DJ:

Auto DJ is a great feature but as far as I can tell it is no different to shuffle by default? I think there is a danger of users thinking it does nothing interesting because the default seems to be just shuffle. I also find the related artists feature has a habit of repeating the same artist over and over in some circumstances (particularly when having very few artists in the library), almost like MusicBee is building the playlist based on so far returned similar artists until it finds more. I also sometimes find myself wishing to be able to combine some of the track selection settings such as preferring higher rated tracks.

In general I love MusicBee over Windows Media Player because it has so many more features (like the great windows 7 taskbar integration, ReplayGain and AccurateRip). Nearly every time I think of something I wish I had in a music player/organizer (which I have being doing a lot of lately as part of my HCI assignment) I find MusicBee generally has it (little things like grouping genres); but it's definitely more complicated than Windows Media Player and some features are rather hard to find. You also seems to have loads of great ideas - some of the features I was going to suggest I see are already in 1.3 (related artists, banning songs from playing).

Hopefully this made some sense and I didn't slip too much into report writing mode

Thanks,
Anthony