I\'m considering of using AmaroK as user interface for my self-made Jukebox, but a few questions about ID3 tagging rise:

I believe ID3v2 supports configurable tags. Why doesn\'t AmaroK ? The only tags I can use are Title, Artist, Album, Track, Year, Comment and Genre.
Because my music collection is rather large, I like to use some additional tags, like:

Country and City of orgin, subgenre (So Jazz can be split into Acid Jazz, Trad Jazz and Latin Jazz i.e.), recordcompany, Highest position in charts etcetera etcetera

Are plugins available for this? Or do I just want to much?

Thanks.

What do you want to use them for?
I believe it would be possible to make them available for the OSD.
I think amarok so far only displays the tags it is using in its database. Supporting configurable tags is not suitable for that.
If you just want to tag your collection, I would suggest to use another program.

Yes, I understand it\'s easier to tag my music with another program. But my problem is AmaroK can\'t do anything with it.
It would be nice if I could sort my music by Record Label or country the same way I can sort by Artist, Title or Album. So in fact, I just want the possibility of adding an extra column in the playlist and the collection browser.

I guess this would be extremely hard to do, as amarok relies on its database and extending this for every new tag looks like a nightmare.
To enable such a level of flexability, we have to come up with a nice idea how to actually do what you are thinking about without breaking everything.

The function Haystack means is called flexible tagging or personalized tagging. It is possible with FLAC Tag and VorbisComment and used by foobar2000 and also Winamp supports it partly. It is extremly usefull when you\'re making a large private music-archive. What do you write when you have two artists in ONE song (Enya & Howard Shore). Or if you want to divide between artist and composer (in classical music) or if you have a large collection of metal for example it\'s usefull to write genre (Metal) plus subgenre (Power Metal) tags. Or if you have a greatest hits-cd you could devide between the original release-date of the song in the original album and the re-release-date of the greatest hits.
With normal tagging it\'s impossible but with foobar2000 and personalized tagging you get so many posibillitiest for sorting the music. It\'s the feature i most miss in amarok.
For those of you who understand german: http://www.audiohq.de/index.php?showtopic=775

Hello,

This is my first message on this forum. I want to explain here my entire problem cause I know I'm not the only one to encounter it.

First of all, it's important to know I'm a music lover, I have a big big music collection, and I have transcoded everything on my computer, so I have something like 17 000 tracks on my computer.
Currently, the only one software that permits me to manage it, offering :
- personal tags management (I use roughly 50 personal tags on top of standard tags)
- configurable databases with user programmable queries
- configurable playlist interface with programmable columns depending on all tags
- the ability to create personal scripts to manage personal tags
- the possibility to put these scripts in contextual menu
And a lot of other features like renaming files from tags using complex patterns.
So, the only one software able to do that is foobar2000 under windows. And for me and for a lot of others music lovers, foobar2000 is the only one reason to stay under windows instead of Linux.
This situation is very very frustrating.

So, regularly, I take a look on all music software available under Linux, but never see what I'm looking for. Perhaps, Linux music community are not aware of this problem and for that I decide to express my problem.

For me, Amarok is the most interesting audio player under Linux, with a great interface, a great pluggin system, and so nice and interesting functionalities (with some of them not available with foobar2000). But, I can't imagine to abandon my foobar and lose all my precious tags and meta information.
So, I understand that will be very complex to restructure Amarok database in order to include metatags, but I'm sure this unique functionality make all the difference between a simple audio player and a meta database music player.

The simple fact to include personal metatags extends exponentially the possibility of a music player (or globally a media player).

For example, actually, when I'm listening to a John Coltrane album, instantaneously, I have a contextual query that informs me of all he's albums I have, doing the difference between albums played as leader or as sideman. When I'm listening to "petite fleur" played by Louis Armstrong, I have a direct access to all the different interpretations of this tune I have.

For these reasons, I think it's a very very good idea and an important step for a player to have the ability to read, write, and take into account at the different levels personal meta tags. I know this can be a very huge work, but I think if in a first time the tags are taken into account at the database level, and if the DCOM interface authorize to interact with them, all the corresponding plugins will be developed by passionate users.

An other important thing to take into account when you are using personal metatags, is the ability to manage multivalued tags. (as said previously, i.e. when you have an album with numerous artists).

Perhaps personal tags can have a different status than classical tags in database in order to simplify database implementation. (I'm don't really know how Amarok database is working, perhaps this idea is dumb...)

I home my post is clear and no one will be take it as a nasty not constructive comment on Amarok. Cause it's not at all my goal.
And excuse me for my bad English.