Rockbox General > Rockbox General Discussion

why do people use tags ??

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racekites:

hey guys...

I'm a simple creature. Computers use files. I use files. Rockbox uses files. Life is simple.

However, a friend just purchased a new (unsupported by Rockbox) mp3 player, a Phillips 30G goGear. It uses Windows Media Player to sync files onto the device. It then uses the ID3 tags to order and index the tracks.

Why do modern player tend to use tags to index the music ??

There's no way to simply copy files onto the player from a computer and play them.

I've never understood why we use tags. All my audio (and video) is organised in directories. I have a top level music directory which then has folders a to z, in these i have the artist and then albums. Its easy, I know where everything is. If I want to add a new ablum its simple to copy the album into the correct location, it takes seconds. Its simple.

With tags, if the tags are not correctly populated nothing is in order and chaos ensues...

I copied some of my files via WMP, then a sync to the device and because the tags had not been filled in correctly. Some of my media is audiobooks, 10 + CDs to each book, 20 tracks on each CD.... give or take thats 240 tracks. Fixing the tags for just one audiobook takes hours.... WHY !!!

Why do we have tags... how do they benefit the user.... ?

Surely, simple is better ??

Cheers
A

Febs:
This really isn't a Rockbox question.

racekites:

yes agreed, however if tags are such a great thing, why is rockbox written around files and directories... so its kind of about rockbox...  :-*

gnu:
To answer your question:
You have sorted your music by artist (like most other people). But if you wanted to sort it any other way (e.g. by track, by album...) you'd be screwed. If your player uses tags, re-sorting the music is no problem. That's it (in my opinion).

Oh, and if you want to tag your audiobooks, use a program like godfather. It makes it much easier.

And rockbox supports both tag based browsing, and normal file browsing; that way everyone can chose the thing that he likes better.

soap:
People use tags because a directory structure, no matter how complex, is not a database.
Please tell me how I can keep track of:
(easy ones)
  Track Artist
  Album Artist
  Release Year
  Track Number
  Album Name
  Track Name
  Genre
(hard ones)
  Replaygain Track Peak
  Replaygain Album Peak
  Lyrics
  Comment
  Encoder
  Composer
  Language
  BPM
  Recording Date
and on and on and on...
in a directory structure without hitting a pathname limit.

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