@rocketsurgeon
I understand your problem, but using folder names as labels for "playlists"/"collections" is really unusual. Normal structure, if any, would be artist/album/track as Mamarok suggested. Your structure is based on events and dates which is a personnel structure. These informations should be part of the file and not a folder name. I would use the comment field or labels for this, so it will also work, if copied to a media player or another location.
On the other hand, without the tags bugs, you can drag all songs from file browser to the playlist and name it equally, as you said.

@loxx
It's hardly to believe, that you know what 90% of Windoze users prefer. If you can, you will be better than Billy Boy's staff and shall consider sending your application to Richmond;-)
"Never working" is mostly caused by bad/no/wrong tags or crippled taggers/players. Just give the artists the respect they deserve for their work and tag their songs correctly.

m0nk

Rocketsurgeon, can you tell us what the bug # is? I just sorted my Music folder in the Files browser by "smith" and correctly got Bessie Smith, Elliot Smith, Patti Smith, and the Smiths. However, when I added those tracks to the playlist, none of them were rated or showed the covers, while I'm sure *some* of those tracks are rated, and some of the albums should have covers. Also, the tags seem to be almost non-existant, as you say. The Now Playing applet seems to have no information about the tracks at all.

So we do seem to have a problem. There should be no difference in behavior in the playlist or the context applets in a track added from the collection, or from the file-system -- IF the track is in the collection, which these all are. Indeed, I checked one particular file added to the playlist from the Collection view and from the Files view, and tags and rating are lacking entirely when added from the Files view. I would like to add this information to your bug.

valoriez wrote:Rocketsurgeon, can you tell us what the bug # is?

Sure, here it is:

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=253276

Thanks! I've added my feedback.

Dieter Schroeder wrote:@rocketsurgeon
I understand your problem, but using folder names as labels for "playlists"/"collections" is really unusual. Normal structure, if any, would be artist/album/track as Mamarok suggested. Your structure is based on events and dates which is a personnel structure. These informations should be part of the file and not a folder name. I would use the comment field or labels for this, so it will also work, if copied to a media player or another location.
On the other hand, without the tags bugs, you can drag all songs from file browser to the playlist and name it equally, as you said.

I beg to disagree, it's not at all unusual to have collections of songs in this format. It's the spiritual ancestor of the mix tape, and while it makes a lot less sense in a world where you can easily fit your entire collection on a single disk, that world came about pretty recently for me. Which reminds me that when I've finished ripping my vinyl collection, I need to do the same to my tape collection, or at least extract the playlists from them...

And sure - my ultimate goal is to transform all the various collections of MP3s I have on CD-Rs and whatnot into playlists in my big unified collection of FLACs, but at present, Amarok is making that transition a bit painful.

If you have excellent tags, this might work.

That said, most people would tend to organize their music by artist, album and track, and save playlists as playlists, because this way you can easily listen to your playlists, to the albums, to your top-rated, to your unplayed tracks, to genres, and on and on. Since your playlists are so important to you, you'll want to name them evocatively and back them up by saving both in the database and on your hard drive.

Of course ultimately, it is your call how you organize your music. I think you'll find that it isn't Amarok making your way difficult, but because most tagging and playing apps support the logical organization, rather than an individualistic one.

Well, all I really need is a way to either expose the underlying directory structure when browsing the collection, or have songs in the collection that are added to the play list using the file browser map to their corresponding collection songs, and not be treated as a completely different instances of them.

The info I need is all there, Amarok is just making it difficult to access it. And as I said, my goal is to essentially import these legacy play list into Amarok and my collection.

As for tagging - save for a few stragglers, my entire collection is MusicBrainz-tagged and last.fm-classified. Dunno if that qualifies as "excellent", but it'll have to do for now.

rocketsurgeon wrote:Well, all I really need is a way to either expose the underlying directory structure when browsing the collection, or have songs in the collection that are added to the play list using the file browser map to their corresponding collection songs, and not be treated as a completely different instances of them.

The info I need is all there, Amarok is just making it difficult to access it. And as I said, my goal is to essentially import these legacy play list into Amarok and my collection.

As for tagging - save for a few stragglers, my entire collection is MusicBrainz-tagged and last.fm-classified. Dunno if that qualifies as "excellent", but it'll have to do for now.

I've added my input to the bug in the File browser, and we'll hope for that to be fixed soon. Certainly tracks added from the file browser or collection browser should be identical in every way.

MusicBrainz tagging is excellent for most popular music -- a bit lacking on some classical music, but there is a basic weakness in the tagging formats as a whole which is exposed when one has both popular and classical music in the same collection. Oh, well!

I can tell you that this folder structure issue still isn't resolved. I have a very well made music folder which is structured very neatly and when I move it to any new pc system that isn't running a media player such as foobar2000 it totally butchers the whole layout, compilation albums I've made get absolutely destroyed. You would imagine it would be a really simple thing to implement as well, foobar2000 for Windows just does anything you want it to do in it's stride and makes the whole experience a dream. But I want to start using linux more - so what can you do? It's about compromise. At least until foobar2000 comes out for linux... We'll be so lucky lol

Why not just use your folder structure via the files menu, if you have it just as you like it? The only thing you'll be missing is the album covers, and you should be able to see those in the Now Playing widget.

I have my collection very well sorted and organized, and find that Amarok is almost perfect in mirroring my organization. The few compilations which are sorted incorrectly are easily fixed with the context (right-click) menu: Display under Various Artists.

What do you mean by "absolutely destroyed"?