Having just seen the new context menu arrangement my immediate thought was "That makes so much sense, why wasn't it always like that?". You won't convince me that this is in any way less user-friendly than having up to 32 additional arbitrary menu items on the
Other fields context menu.
If you want to continue this way consistently, you should also have 3 submenues here, but is this really what we want?
I think it makes perfect sense for these menus to be implemented consistently wherever they appear (including the Search Menu fields menu).
I hope, that nevertheless one day, I don't have to scroll over unused custom/virtual tags .
You've already answered your own request with this:
- For virtual tags this would be very easy to recognize, because no formula means no need to show. The tricky part could be, when I use some virtual tags for grouping or so and remove the formula later on.
- For custom tags it could be a little bit more difficult, because I could enter values in tags without renaming it. But it might possible too: Tags which don't have any value in MB's database?
It's very easy for a real human person to look at a virtual tag and think, "I'm not using that, why is it there?". It's much more difficult for a computer program to know what the same real human person intends to do with a custom/virtual tag.
I suppose you could hide virtual tags that don't have a formula in them, but there would be no way to temporarily hide an item - you'd have to delete it and recreate it each time, which limits its usefulness.
To implement what you've suggested for custom tags (hiding ones that don't have a value), MusicBee would need to check the value of every tag against the values stored in the database for every track every time it displayed a context menu (or started up or whenever else is deemed suitable). That's a lot of overhead/work/regression testing just to hide a few menu options.
I agree it would be nice if the used tags were automatically at the top. Since it's not that long of a list, you could probably leave them in the original order: custom1 to custom16, virtual1 to virtual16. If we want them alphabetical we can make them alphabetical.
The same point I made above is also relevant to this. For MusicBee to display "used" tags at the top, it needs to know which tags are "used".
I think the time required to do it properly (and fix any associated bugs) far outweighs any measurable benefits it would provide in the short term.
Bee excellent to each other...