Proposal:New Feature Suggestions
Feature Wishes and New Feature Suggestions
This is a brainstorming page. You can add a feature here and hope that somebody picks it up. But this is not likely to happen at all. This page contains one long messy list and it is not used for active referencing very much.
Therefore if you want to help with TurningYourIdeasIntoReality then it is better to:
- Contact us in the MailingList and discuss your ideas with us.
- Write a FeaturePage (see HowToWriteFeatureSuggestions).
- If you are willing to work on it (or have found someone to do it for you) then list (and describe!) your FeaturePage on FutureWork or CurrentWork.
- If what you want is an instrument added to the AR attribute dropdown list, please go to InstrumentAdditionDiscussion and discuss it there, please.
Too Long List of Feature Suggestions:
Support for Subdirectories in the MusicBrainzTagger
It would be cool if it could support sub folders when you choose the dir... --anonymous
You can use drag and drop with the tagger. That should help --DonRedman
Lyrics option tied to songs in database. --anonymous
Support for Hidden Bonus Tracks
If a CD has extra-long tracks (usually the last track) which contain a large amount of silence and then a hidden / bonus track, I usually split them into 2 files: the track named on the sleeve, and the bonus track. (For example, http://musicbrainz.org/showalbum.html?albumid=39118) It would be useful if MusicBrainz could:
- identify these derived tracks, so that the appropriate tagging info could be used. Currently, they are unidentified as they are a completely different length to the originals. I am hesitant to add the TRM for the trimmed version as an alternative for the last track, as I'm not sure whether it should count as belonging to that album or not.
- this is a bit more BlueSky, I know, but it might be worth considering a metadata representation for the positions of multiple songs in releases of this sort, which could be used as a guide for splitting the track. - IMSoP
I too would like this issue resolved --anonymous
Resolve Redundant/Duplicate Albums
MusicBrainz stores a unique ID for TRM, track, artist and album. Do these IDs have a date code built into them/or are the obseleted when changes are made in the database? My thinking is: the Tagger clearly uses these codes to confirm that an audio file is already saved. It does not appear to check the server before moving these files to the saved category. If it did and if there were built-in obsolescence codes when a change is made in the server database then previously tagged files would be automatically updated. For example, currently there are redundant albums in the database (i.e. the Beatles White Album or Elton John's Yellow Brick Road). Songs from one disc are identified as belonging to several different albums (as evident by the different album names, some with disc numbers in their name). Currently I don't tag these because, though the artist and title are correct, there is confusion as to the album naming. I would be willing to tag these if I knew that the tags would be automatically updated one day when someone corrects the redundancies in the database. --anonymous
(moved here from below because it covers the same topic --DonRedman): The user should have the *option* of selecting an album where there are multiple album matches for a given track by an artist. For example, MusicBrainz frequently selects a greatest hits album (not necessarily official) or even obscure compilations of multiple artists. The user could be more accurate in identifying source album from a group of potential album sources. In my case, the user may wish to be deliberately inaccurate--selecting the original album rather than the source greatest hits album. --anonymous
If I understand this right, then this issue will be resolved by the PicardTagger. Can anybody confirm this and then move this to OldFeatureSuggestions? --DonRedman
Set Preferred Geographic Region in the Taggger
There should be a preference in the tagger for a geographic region (for example, if all my albums were bought in the US, then disregard editions of the album published in Australia). This would lead to more accurate tagging and perhaps reduce the likelihood of TrmCollisions. --anonymous
Support the replaygain tag
I think Musicbrainz should write replaygain tags. I have no idea how or what you do to write them but im sure you can google it. For those who dont know, replaygain is a standard to fix the variable volumes in mp3's, I know foobar2k uses it, and it works real well. --anonymous
This might not be too smart since the volume is defined by the encoder-settings. Besides foobar2k recalculates the replaygain every time you play the song by default (if I remember correctly), it sure do calculate the values if the files doesn't have 'em. And thirdly, only foobar2k uses these tags yet. The replaygainplugin for winamp use its own tags. So there is no need to implement a field which wouldn't be of any use to most people, and most probably would be wrong for the few who uses it!
- That is quite incorrect. ReplayGain was designed to be a common standard - to work in the same way on all platforms and all players. And currently, the only way to scan for ReplayGain data in Foobar2000 is to do it manually - it does not recalculate ReplayGain every time when playing the song. MusicBrainz should leave the ReplayGain tag intact, since the actual sound stream is not modified. Currently, the ReplayGain tags are always removed. --intgr
Present a List of Choices in the Tagger UI when TrmCollisions Occur
It would be a major time-saver in the MusicBrainzTagger if, when a TRM matches more than one track, I could pick the correct one without having to send it to the unidentified tab. I assume it's a user-interface safeguard not that they have to be moved at all. What would be better would be if ALL exact matches appeared in the entry, so i could radio-button the correct one. --ChozCunningham
i second this one.. major head ache... even if a 4th tab is needed or something for files whose trm matches more than 1 song... --anonymous
As it is, it would appear that no further automated tagging occurs following a trm collision (even though, for there to be a trm collision, it would seem that there are at least two matches). A context menu in the Tagger with the ability to chose one of the two trms (or none) would be very nice. --anonymous
Enhance the RelatedArtists Feature
PLEASE PLASE PLASE! add a feature similar to "people who liked this song/artist also liked..." --anonymous
- This could probably be quite easily implemented using the XML interface of www.echocloud.com --Pelpet
- That's what the RelatedArtist
s are. --RjMunro- Try audioscrobbler.com - you may be able to link up with their system to impliment? -- Kim
- this seems to be well underway and already running on the testserver. audioscrobbler specifies what kind of other music listen to as well, if you share similar tastes --G0llum
- Try audioscrobbler.com - you may be able to link up with their system to impliment? -- Kim
- That's what the RelatedArtist
Song recognition (using a bit of song)
I just wanted to suggest a new function to add to your wonderful program: the possibility to know a song title and artist only by using 20-30 seconds of the song (as the "Shazam" service for mobile phones). For example, if I'm listening to a beautiful song at the radio and I'd like to know the song title I could record a piece of song and submit it to you to receive the title. Is it feasible with your architecture?
Add the ability to collapse tracks from the same artist that appear on multiple releases into one single track with only one UUID
If the above was done then one side-effect would be the ability to use the tracklists of CDs you don't own as readymade playlists. For example, if you owned all of the individual albums released by a band such as Simon & Garfunkel you would be able to use one of their many Greatest Hits as a playlist to save you creating your own. Or if you owned a lot of songs from the 60s (volumes 1 through X of "Hits of the 60s" perhaps) then you may be interested in listening to "Girl Groups of the 60s" or "#1 hits of 1967" or "The Psychedelic Sounds of the 60s" or "The Songs of Burt Bacharach" etc.
Analyzing this relationship data (artist/song x appears on n compilations with artist/song z) would also probably give (yet another) metric of relatedness for songs. See RelatedArtists.
The trick with this though is that there ARE some alternate versions of songs by the same artist with identical titles (perhaps alternate mixes on different albums) and also, that the UUIDs as they stand right now also help to identify what album a track is from, which can be handy in some cases. Perhaps an additional "General Song UUID" would be better to track songs (as opposed to tracks)? -- Pipian
Suggestion: I've noticed my version of the Tagger, 0.8.5, compares both the TRM ID and the current tag info when calculating the degree of similarity between my track and the ones on the server. Maybe my track info is all screwed up, and the program tells me the song is only a little similar to the one in the server, and only if it gets the right song. This could be reduced if the comparison involved the TRM ID only. Maybe only after that has failed, the current tag info would be used to look for a match.
Daniel CSF, 20030329
Add an option to control placement of "The" in titles. For instance, "The Who" versus "Who, The" and some may prefer just "Rolling Stones", for example.
- I assume you mean into the tagger... It's easily possible given that MusicBrainz has a sortname field. The last I heard this was being added into the MusicBrainz library, so it's only a matter of time before it should get into the tagger. - ArchieB
- You may also want to harass the makers of your favourite mp3 player to support the sort the TSOP tag in ID3v2 which is designed to contain the sortname of the performer. This means you can have "Bob Marley", "Bob Marley & the Wailers" and "Ziggy Marley" listed together under M, without having to display them as "Marley, Bob", "Marley, Bob & the Wailers" and "Marley, Ziggy".
Some singles have the same name as the album. Making the metadata visible (and usable in the tagger) in some way may reduce the urge for people to tacksingle on to the end of the title. The same goes for live and instrumental albums. If people want this style for their own data then it should be an option in the tagger.
Also, there is a great singles database available from www.discogs.com and I believe that it could be accessed in much the same way as freedb.com is used now. - ObedFernandez
- I put in a feature suggestion at http://www.discogs.com to provide RDF/SOAP interfaces to their database. -- DanielOconnor
What about the ability to search on artist AND album? This would allow much greater accuracy when searching the site.
- You can do this using the "Advanced search" part of the search page (basically it's the Tagger lookup, but without the Tagger) - djce
I assume (from the donate button) that you need money to keep the project going. Have you considered a 'sponsor an improvement' scheme. I'd be willing to donate money to see the two improvements above get done. People could pledge money to particular improvements, and once a set limit was hit, they would get done. This would also let you know which improvements were the most popular.
The interface could use some tweaking. The ability to select multiple albums and do a batch command on them from the normal, non-expanded album list view has disappeared. This forces the user to go to the compact view just to do batch commands. :(
Also, we could consolidate the info/edit lines in the album details view. Right now there are way too many links when you're looking at a single album.
Finally, a really useful improvement would be to list the date of release for the album in the normal, non-expanded album list view. It would be great to have these automatically sorted by date, too.
~Tenebrous~
Another good thing would be for the interface to remember the last set state of the album listing for a users when they are logged in. So if you set an artist to a compact listing it will remain that way as long as you are logged in. This would prevent the user from having to keep setting the album listing when it's different from what the "view compact when more than X albums are listed" preference.
~Tenebrous~
Also when you are importing an album, if we could add a release at that time, it would save another step.
~Tenebrous
FreeDB stores year info for many releases, and it is surprisingly accurate. --bawjaws
But FreeDB doesn't have release date for many albums and when it does, MusicMoz doesn't get that piece of info on input. Also, we need a way to denote which record company/label released the album.
~Tenebrous~
It's important to distinguish between types of releases in terms of how available a release is. Contrast a major-label release and an indie release with a specialty release done by the band themselves in which only 1000 copies are ever made. I propose creating an extra tag or category (could be in addition to existing structure or just add this to the album/ep/etc list) called "Limited" for these specialty releases.
~Tenebrous~
It also would be nice to choose an abbreviated release selection page when importing releases from freedb. If you've done it more than 40 times, you know what each item is, yet you still have to scroll the whole page down to get to the submit button.
~Tenebrous~
I second everyting that has been said about release years. Also it should be possible to mass-import release years for the albums already in the database from freedb or amazon (but they should probably be marked as "inaccurate" or similar so that future moderators won't be confused if they see a bad release year).
/Beliuxxx
I have 2 ideas, both of which are for the tagger. First, I would like for there to be a way to not just remove a track from being analyzed by the tagger, but to totally delete it from my computer. Too often, either a downloaded mp3 or one that i have ripped myself will have errors in it, and it would be beneficial to be able to remove the track from within the tagger. Secondly, since all the tracks have a unique track ID, would it be possible to store this ID in the comment field of an ID3v1 or ID3v2 tag? As a corrallary, this info could be used to refresh my own collection to any changes that may have occured since the last time the tracks were tagged without needing to completely reanalyze the track.
--If you were to use this just for personal use, it might be beneficial to create a table (read: XML) with the TRM and a file's corresponding checksum, so that the process of refreshing a collection occurs quicker. I think putting the TRM in the comment field would be necessary only for the convenience of other users who download from you. I'm not sure if either way is better / easier, but just thought I'd throw my comment out there. -evileyetmc
A suggestion for a new search on the Advanced page: moderations in which you added a note. It's difficult to keep track of what you agreed to do when you can't search by this and the search doesn't let you plop down in the middle of all your moderations, but forces you to go to the a number and hit > to get the next seven entries or so. ~Tene
Dont know if these features have already been suggested (or already exist!)- i don't want to read the complete page as it is my first visit to this wiki... - so please drop me a short comment if they are. - (1) I'd like to start browsing by entering the artist name so i haven't to click letter by letter. - And (2): Could the .cddb file for an album be made available for download?? - FloK, 04-01-20
Don't know if this is possible or not, but can there be album art integrated into the database. I would really like to completely get rid of MusicMatch but this is the only thing holding me back.
Lyrics would be nice too. /Pelpet
I think it would be nice if the tagger could open playlist files. Then I could easily select poorly tagged files in winamp/foobar2k and export a list to the tagger.
/Pelpet
SubscribeToModerator
The following is largely addressed by the recent suggestion of SubscribeToModerator ("watch" another moderator's edits/votes):
This is more of a social / website suggestion, but when I was going through some random moderations, I saw that somebody as anal as I am had gone and done some thorough updates (fixes, not just freedb imports). It's easy to click through the user link to see all their mods, but actually what I wanted was a list of all their open mods so that I could vote for them. It's a bit of a pain to set up an advanced search for one moderator's open mods, but I was able to do so manually, and I voted for pretty much every one of them. I had some confidence in their correctness - they weren't all perfect, but all were improvements over what was already there. It's a nice reward for somebody who has obviously put more than a few minutes into correcting data, and actually takes much less time than voting on an equivalent number of random mods (most of which are album adds/imports that have already been entered anyhow).
It would be nice if individual moderator pages had a quick link to "vote on this person's moderations" that would pull up an advanced search for that person's open mods - then when you click on submit, the page refreshes with the remaining open mods. It might also be helpful to add something to the moderation faq suggesting this sort of "buddy mod".
The Edit Releases pages are awkward - it requires a minimum of three extra pages and four clicks to add a single release date to an album that has no release information. And the first time I entered release data, I didn't realized that I had to "Enter Moderations" for them to take effect (I thought that the "Submit" button had already done it). It would be much nicer if "Edit Releases" for an album with no releast info took you directly to a page where you could enter a release without having to click on "Add Release" and "Submit" - it would also be easier if the "Submit" button actually submitted any changes. dupuy
Have more ServerAccessPaths for cgi-bin/mq_2_1.pl: In particular, allow fuzzy searching rather than requiring an ID. Why? Say I want to link to something in RDF but I don't want to spend exhorbitant amounts of time looking for a TRM/MBID - or I have an automated service which *cannot* do it. This would mean that simple RDF clients like Foaf Explorer could explore MusicBrainz without having to know SOAP to discover fuzzy IDs. If (when) this is implemented, please contact me -- DanielOconnor (mailto:daniel.oconnor@gmail.com)
HAve you seen the distributed moderation system in place at urbandictionary.com ? If you add or use their data, it has a very quick and fun feature that shows you previous moderation decisions, and lets you say good, bad, indifferent to them.
It's a way of getting time-poor types like me to contribute stuff, as it becomes a nice, gentle background task and quite compelling.
Kim
When the tagger can't find the album based on the current ID3 info, could it look to file name/path? Although my collection is in rough shape wrt ID3s, it is very accurately sorted in the file structure, which is definitely info accessible to the tagger.
