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Some usability things
PowderPostSeptember 29, 2014, 19:06
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March 4, 2013, 18:53
Normal topicSome usability things

Involved People editing field

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It’s great, that there is a «Involved People» field now! I think the usability can be optimized, tho. In the main editor pane there are colour-circles to delete the changes. It’s a bit confusing, that in this case there are three input boxes. Just one would be much cleaner and logical imo.

The most intuitive way of editing this field would be to just write into it in the main pane and put the fields «revert to initial / edited» in the circle-menu. It’s very confusing to see the text field and not being able to write into it, I don’t see any reason for this. Why can’t this field behave like the comment-field? Btw. for what is the «editing state value»?

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Multiple-value-fields vs. separated list

I’m a bit confused which fields are multi-value fields and which not. The only option I found about that is in the Discogs option.

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As this does not only happen with Discogs-fields (e.g. multiple-artists), a general option would make sense, too.
Not sure how many people use multi-value fields (I don’t) but using them has some positive aspects. I think it makes sense to use multi-value fields in every fields which is non-standard (UDTIs, not artist-fields e.g. because of compatibility with soft- and hardware-players). So I think two options would be perfect, one for standard-fields (artist e.g.) and one for UDTIs (Discogs-data e.g.).

In the comment-field pressing the return key just adds a newline (probably «\n»), in a multi-value-field it would make sense to visually separate the items, maybe something like a list view (alternating background-colors).

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2MR2PostSeptember 29, 2014, 22:23
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August 23, 2012, 19:27
Normal topicRe: Some usability things

Yate has always supported the Involved People and Musicians Credits fields 🙂

The coloured circles display the various different change states and serve as a source for the context menu. This replaces the checkbox and disclosure triangle previously used prior to v3.0. I however do like the idea of adding the revert options to the control as an alternative if 'you just want to do it'.

These operate consistently across all fields. The 'Choose Value' function operates differently depending on the number of files selected. BTW the Choose Value sheet can be resized.

This is pretty much at the heart of the v3 UI changes and is beyond me changing at this time.

My thinking in the first image is that you have access to the initial value, the editing state value and the current value. You can easily view each value and decide whether you effectively want to revert or not. Testers seemed to like this functionality.

The editing state values are the values at the time the current file selection was made. As you are editing files you have access to the current values, the initial values and the values when the files were selected. Again, this has been in Yate pretty much since the beginning and is definitely used by others.

Multi-Value fields follow the ID3 specification which served as a basis for Yate's initial design. The help topic Multiple Items and Multiple Values gives an overview. Most simple text items with the exception of URLs can have multiple values. Multiple values are not handled correctly by most audio players and by iTunes in particular. I guess I could add a list of fields which support them.

You mention UDTIs ... but they are not multi-value fields. In the stuff I added for the ANV names with Discogs I use the multi-value separator as it was convenient but the actual UDTI is stored as a single text item as ID3 does not define it as a multi-value field.

Alternating colours in the edit field would be great but it is definitely not supported by the API. To support it I would have to move to a table control and then editing would be painful. Good idea but difficult to implement.

I hope I'm not coming across as negative. I'm personally not happy with the fact that Involved People and Musicians Credits cannot be edited directly. I'm on a mission to fill the Musician Credits field for all my albums. That's why there is a Format Credits action statement. I download a lot of concerts from Concert Vault and their web site usually has a list of the musicians credits. I usually copy the data, paste it into the Musician Credits field and run an action to format the data appropriately.

I can easily make both these role based fields editable but how do I convey to users that the correct format for data entry is role=artist? ID3 simply stores the values as a special formatted multi-value field: role\0artist\0\role\artist...

I guess the first time one of those fields got focus I could pop up a description. I'm open to suggestions.

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