Loving MM5 but some things just irritate the OCD.

[Simon Armstrong]

Having played with MM5 over the last 24 hours I have now chosen to embrace it fully and hibernate MM4. There are however some things that just grate as the following examples, which I don't think anyone has raised, will demonstrate.

1) Just plain irritating. Having played a bit with the auto-tag feature to fill in missing data, I notice that the default provider is MusicBrainz, which is fine, though I do prefer Discogs. However, the date tagged from MusicBrainz is the original recording date as opposed to the album date, yet MM5 posts this into Album date as opposed to original date. Grrrrrr. An axample is Abba Gold. Whilst this was originally released as a greatest hits compilation in 1992, the date in MM5 is now shown as 1976, which is the release date of the first song, Dancing Queen (Happy Days). What I would really like is both values, albeit posted to the correct fields. Fortunately I only applied this to one album (Abba Gold) which I corrected in MP3Tag Field Format by populating the original date field with Year and then populating year with 1992.

2) Confused. Referring to paragraph 1) above, how do you distinguish between different releases of the same album. For instance I have two versions of Pink Floyd: Animals on file, one labelled as Animals (1994 Remaster) and the other Animals (2011 Remaster). Auto-Tag will rename these as Animals with a 1977 Release Date, thus merging the files. I have added a URL below showing how I would ideally like these to appear in MM5. Any thoughts.

Animals by Simon Armstrong, on Flickr

3) Illness inducing. I initially put off trying MM5 properly when upon first launch I was greeted by a skin that, after a night on the tiles, would send many straight to the nearest WC. You call it Golden Monkey, but honestly, this looks like a relic from the Flower Power days of the early seventies. Unlikely to create a good first impression if you're trying to promote MM5 as a modern platform. Black Monkey looks better but don't utter the name in public as you might be arrested for inciting racial hatred.

4) Minor, but annoying all the same. When I am in MM5, why do I get prompts that there is an updated version, for MM4?

I want to empathise that I do very much like much of MM5 and congratulate you on your work to date. However paragraphs 1) and 2) above stop me from making full use of the application which is a shame.

[PetrCBR]

Thanks for your feedback!!

[Davo]

Re dates. I find the terminology confusing.
MM has a sort by 'release date' option but the Properties editor only provides for Date & Original date. Surpringly if i select The 'Release Date' option it re-sorts the album grid even though i don't tag anything with a 'Release Date".??
Logically i would expect a message saying there is no tag to sort on.

Then we have the Years node which appears to use the Date field. For my purposes i don't use actual dates (dd-mm-yyyy). I populate the Date field with the Year, and for me that means the year the album was originally recorded. As it turns out that works ok with MM5 Years node.