Why I'm not using MM5 yet

[Barry4679]

Hm, no. I'm in the folders collection, I select a folder. The menu from View>Main Panel then has the Views, View Elements, and customize shows Manage Views and then the option to toggle subfolders or not. But if I click on the views button in the toolbar, in the top right, I get the exact same options but without the toggle option. The last one is Manage Views.

Yeah, I was confused.
But you can assign a hotkey to the Recursive Toggle action

[Barry4679]

It was actually 16 points. My issue is basically all 4 of the tagging issues: 13 to 16

13- First thing I do is use the "My Computer" node to travel to the temp folder where I keep my music. I then select all files and clear out the fields I don't want. This is done easily on MM4, as it has the "All" sub-node. I have no way of doing this on MM5. I can't select all tracks on subfolders.

I presume that you have this covered now.. ?
BTW If you are in List By Album view, a click on the Artwork selects all tracks in the album.
The version that I have, crashes if I ctrl+click the Artwork, but I think this fixed but not yet published AFAIK.

I can't offer any tips for your remaining points.
I don't rip using the MM ripper. I use a full function ripper, and get all the tagging help that I need there.
For my purposes the MM5 tagging support is all that I would want or need, because I only use it micro-managing.

At this point, I move the fixed folders into the library, where MM will auto-organize them. I haven't tried it yet on MM5 but I have no reason to expect any issues there.

It depends how you move the folders.
MM5 is relatively crappy at drag&drop in my (minority?) opinion.
I have a good work flow for this task, but for reliability it is a narrow path, so you may want to check this step before any final decision to migrate.

I am pleased with MM5, and would never consider downgrading, but it all depends upon what facets are important to you.

[DJSamhein]

I know that I can click the folders in the folders node for each album and see the track list, but I needed to select them all (which I could) and see the tracklist for them all, which I couldn't. It's not an issue anymore, anyway. There's an option for what I want, I was just looking in the wrong place.

I don't rip with MM, I just add mp3 files to it. From bandcamp and other online sources. So I need to clean/fix tag before I add them to MM library. And I have a workflow I follow to do so. Having a huge library requires some more strict rules, otherwise it will become a mess (as has happened way back in the past).

Comparing to discogs releases is a huge part of it. From experience, musicbrainz isn't as accurate as discogs, nor does it have as many releases. Not to mention all the other things the addon does, like allowing me to just fix the album name without changing track titles, letting me place original date into the date field, rather than release date, etc.

Likewise for the Tagging Inconsistencies addon. It checks for a lot of things which sometimes skip my attention when adding stuff.

MM5 doesn't seem to have the tools to replace them. Even a simple thing like point 14, which is capitalizing every word (including "the", "a", etc) and adding leading zeros isn't possible with current MM5 tools and addons.

To be clear, I'm perfectly content with MM4 as is. Other than a few quirks, it serves my purposes pretty well and does what I need it to. I would like to upgrade to MM5 as the browsing and playing experience seems a lot nicer, with a lot of pretty good features.
But not at the cost of library integrity. And using one for playing and the other for managing the library is too much of a hassle and has the risk of the databases getting out of sync with each other.

So I was curious if you were planning on providing alternatives anytime soon, either by providing more direct support to addon creators or implementing them yourselves when that isn't possible, like you did with other addons that are already embedded in MM5.

P.S.: I never did get an answer to point 11. Is it possible, or is it planned to become possible, to simply have the player display "Remaining time/Full length" for the track, like it did in MM4? And if not, might I ask why it was dropped?

[Andre_H]

using one for playing and the other for managing the library is too much of a hassle

The following is not a solution in that sense, nor do I want to contradict the criticized things in any way, but only show a possible workaround: I only use MP3Tag for "pre-tagging": With a few pre-defined actions there, unwanted tags can be deleted (basically I set which tags are kept, everything else is cleaned), the desired tags brought into a uniform format and contents were formatted/maintained, usually with 2-3 mouse clicks. Doesn't matter if single tracks or whole folder contents. Only then do I move those tracks into my music folder and thus into the care of MMW.

Important: I'm talking about tracks that are usually at least filled correctly in terms of content and "only" need to be maintained regarding tag formats, fields, spellings, etc., not the auto-filling of this content itself. MP3Tag also has the usual interfaces to Discorg, Picard, MusicBrainz, etc., but I hardly ever use them.

Maybe it's worth a try ...

[Lowlander]

Are you viewing an actual folder in the Folders node (ie. not selected the root Folders node)?

[DJSamhein]

Regarding using MP3Tag:
I have used it a long time ago. I don't know if it's a good tool these days or not. But right now I only need MM4 for my workflow. If I have to use external programs for MM5, I'd rather just stick with MM4. I'd actually prefer to use MM4/MM5 combo rather than use other tools for now.

My opinion is just that those addons are pretty widely used, from what I understand, and their value is huge. I'd assume it would be a good addition to MM5 itself. I'm a programmer myself and I know that it's not always easy to add new things, schedule for new stuff/fixes keeps getting pushed and there's always a lot of things planned. We always have more stuff to program than time to do it
But it would be nice if MM5 were to actually incorporate those into the base program. I think it would greatly increase the value of the program for everyone.

Are you viewing an actual folder in the Folders node (ie. not selected the root Folders node)?

What do you mean? Are you referring to when I said I selected all folders and no tracklist showed? If that is the case, I was in the Folders node and selected the temp folder I use. On top, it showed all subfolders in that folder. I then clicked in that zone without selecting a folder and hit Ctrl+A. It selected all folders but nothing else happened.

[Lowlander]

If you're selected a specific folder in the Media Tree, then the option should be available in the Main Menu (there is also a button to the right top of the Filelisting for this).

[DJSamhein]

That's what I said before. In the main menu, in View/Main Panel, the recursive toggle shows up, but in the top right views button in the toolbar, that option doesn't show up. In fact, it's the only difference between the two. Maybe I'd have found it sooner if the option was in the views toolbar button as well.

Much like what happened to me when trying to set up the playing panels. I right clicked one of the toolbars, went to the Layout option and it showed me all possible panels except the main one. It seems like a non-intuitive way to configure things. Maybe you could also place that option there, to make it redundant, so that users can find it more easily when accessing that through a different route? It seems logical that one of the first things you'd look into when trying to adjust your playing experience would be the Options, so it should be possible to configure the main panel there as well. My opinion anyway.

Having options scattered in different ways, or having them show different things depending on if you're using the main menu or the button that supposedly does the same thing is just confusing.