Color Coding Feature for Songs [Highlighting]

[Nixander]

In my oppinion, the advantages of a coloured song is that you can highlight ONE proporty of a song:

If  I had a track marked tempo=fast=255,125,0 (orange); mood=energetic=255,0,0 (red); occasion=workout=255,0,255 (magenta)
would MB show all 3 colours as a gradient, pick only the first colour or do a blend of all the colours that hopefully wont match a colour that is already tagged for something else?

With too many colours in one song or with a blending of colour :
- you could get confused with the meaning of many colours
- you would not see directly which colour the song has, so you wouldn't have the effect of seeing directly why the song is marked.
-With many different colours in one song you would have the same problems as with the written tags: Too much information for a fast recognization of  the "special property" (like slow BPM, no artwork) you're looking for

But I realize that it would be great to have different "colour-rules" at the same time but that there would be interferences for songs which would apply for 2+ colourrules.

Possible Solutions:
- Have a colour priority list, so that a song, even if it applies to two colour rules would one show one colour rule dependet on the priority list
-  colour the tags if you had more than one colour rule applying to the song (A song which is slow would have the BPM tag-field coloured blue; if the genre is IDM, than IDM would be coloured red)
- To make some Tags BOLT instead of two colours, so that a  song which is slow would be completly blue; and if the genre is IDM, than IDM would be written in BOLT)


Also I would like to say that i really like Gregs mashup with the Drop-down Menu

Potential usefulness aside, this has the possibility of making MB look very ugly!  

if youd had custom colours you could make them even look nice in the skin. I get you're point, but even if it would be ugly, for me, usefullness is more important than a good-looking skin.

[Steven]

i'm not opposed to doing this as text colours, but just as a suggestion - would it be better (and less ugly/distracting) is any matches were displayed as an coloured icon in the left side of the main panel where the playing track speaker displays (like the category icon in MS Outlook)? That way you could also have 2 colours displayed in the icon where there are multiple matches

[Greb]

i'm not opposed to doing this as text colours, but just as a suggestion - would it be better (and less ugly/distracting) is any matches were displayed as an coloured icon in the left side of the main panel where the playing track speaker displays (like the category icon in MS Outlook)? That way you could also have 2 colours displayed in the icon where there are multiple matches

Let's make it visual. I'm not using exactly icons but I think it gets the general feeling.

[Full Text]


[Icons]



By the way, +1 for [Full Text]. I think you get the info in a very quick look, that is more useful.

[Bee-liever]

By the way, +1 for [Full Text]. I think you get the info in a very quick look, that is more useful.

yes, I agree that the coloured text conveys the information quicker and is easier to 'scan' than numbers/icons, but, just call me "thick" and get it over with, because without a better idea of the mechanics of how the colours will be applied, especially regarding multiple matches, I find it hard to agree with more than 'those colours look good' 

[Nixander]

i'm not opposed to doing this as text colours, but just as a suggestion - would it be better (and less ugly/distracting) is any matches were displayed as an coloured icon in the left side of the main panel where the playing track speaker displays (like the category icon in MS Outlook)? That way you could also have 2 colours displayed in the icon where there are multiple matches

+1 for this, i think this would be the perfect combination of a) a clean layout and b) the advantage of  colourcodes even if there are muliple colour rules apply.

In my oppinion dots would look better than the MS Oulook "round" squares but I like the genreal idea

[Antonski]

i'm not opposed to doing this as text colours, but just as a suggestion - would it be better (and less ugly/distracting) is any matches were displayed as an coloured icon in the left side of the main panel where the playing track speaker displays (like the category icon in MS Outlook)? That way you could also have 2 colours displayed in the icon where there are multiple matches

Agree, and if the colour is defined by IF-THEN-ELSE clause, there will be only one match, if you get what I mean.

[Steven]

i have done a basic implementation:
- highlighting rules are defined in the Tags(2) preferences
- only the first matching rule is applied
- the colour is displayed as a block in field "Highlight" - the field can be displayed as any column

http://musicbee.niblseed.com/V2_1/MusicBee_Exe_Patched.zip

one thing i probably will enhance is to allow each rule to be named, and to be able to quickly select the active rules eg. if you have named rules for Rock and another for Metal want to switch between highlighting just Rock tracks to just Metal tracks

[Steven]

i've made the change so you can now specify which rules are active
and by right clicking in the "Highlight" column in the main panel you can directly open the Highlight rules dialog

http://musicbee.niblseed.com/V2_1/MusicBee_Exe_Patched.zip

[beeing good]

Very nice Steven, this will be handy.

[Greb]

i've made the change so you can now specify which rules are active
and by right clicking in the "Highlight" column in the main panel you can directly open the Highlight rules dialog

http://musicbee.niblseed.com/V2_1/MusicBee_Exe_Patched.zip

Really nice. And you were right. It looks better that way than colouring the whole line.

By the way. Bugs.
- The artist 'similar' feature doesn't work (for me).

Ideas.
- Top tracks from an Artist or Top trakcs from Similar to an Artist?
- Saving and loading set of rules? I even would propose some predefined set of rules for newbies   (it's not that intuitive)

Another thing. Using the rule 'Comment has a value' is perfect to introduce any note in the comments tag and using it as a marker. It could be interesting to give the chance to show this tag as a kind of 'post-it' note...

EDIT I didn't read the 'make hightlights active' post. Discard the saving and loading proposal, though the predefined set of rules for newbies could be still a nice idea...

[Zak]

...predefined set of rules for newbies could be still a nice idea...

Newbies won't be looking for ways to colour code their music.

To put it another way:

I think "Huh. What the hell does this coloured box mean and how do I get rid of it?" will be asked much more often than "Okay, music imported. Now, how can I assign a coloured label to my favourite Justin Bieber tracks?".

Just sayin'... 

[Steven]

By the way. Bugs.
- The artist 'similar' feature doesn't work (for me).

thats fixed for the next update

[Steven]

this has the fix, also now if you single click the "Highlights" column header it opens the settings dialog
http://musicbee.niblseed.com/V2_1/MusicBee_Exe_Patched.zip

[Zak]

I like the current subtle implementation of highlighted tracks (as opposed to full row colouring, coloured text etc).

A couple of points:

if you single click the "Highlights" column header it opens the settings dialog

For consistency, shouldn't that sort tracks so that tracks of the same colour are together, and uncoloured tracks are last?

It also just occurred to me that being strictly rule based, there's no way to highlight an arbitrary selection of tracks - to follow up for tagging, listening, or syncing for example. Not sure how you would go about that, but given the colours aren't useful outside of MusicBee you could just store the assigned colour in the database and use it to override any rule-based colours.

[Greb]

this has the fix, also now if you single click the "Highlights" column header it opens the settings dialog
http://musicbee.niblseed.com/V2_1/MusicBee_Exe_Patched.zip

Thanks!  

Btw, bugs:
- The firs rule always applies, no matter is highlighted or not.
- New rules without a name are not saved. It would be good to set a name by default, "new rule" for example, to avoid people setting rules and discovering they vanished after saving it.
- Changing the percentage of similarity according to last.fm doesn't change the hightlighted similar artists. Shouldn't it be more hightlighted ones with higher percentages?  

Sorry