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Topic: Foobar Design Flaw: Meta data mixed with data (Read 3984 times) previous topic - next topic
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Foobar Design Flaw: Meta data mixed with data

I am relatively fresh to Foobar and am still evaluating it, so I ask myself whether it is safe to rely on Foobar to build up my music collection.

The entire concept of the core Foobar is to immediately write tags to the files itself.  This is bad style and brings too massive disadvantages, ultimately posing a serious security risk.

Unnecessary backup volume
No "undo"

So first of all, this creates unnecessary high data volumes for backup.  If I just changed the rating of a file from 3 to 4, I need to backup a 6-meg file.  As a result, any user will perform the backups less frequent than needed and not on safe media (i.e. only permanently connected hard drive instead of a CD or Compact Flash or Web folder)

Even worse, there is no way to implement an "undo" function.  We are humans and make mistakes, so every application that cannot undo is either poorly written or incomplete.  Just assume you have assigned hotkeys for rating and press one of them---but unfortunately you have not only checked one song but half of your playlist.  All ratings are deleted with one simple keystroke!

Now of course there is Foo_CustomInfo.  But this is just a plugin.  I believe that such a core feature as offline storage belongs into the core application and not into an addon.

In addition, CustomInfo does not support synchronizing between offline and file meta data.  What Foobar should provide is to bidirectionally synchronize tags between offline DB and the file.  So assume you just downloaded or ripped songs, so naturally you want to copy the meta data into your DB.  Or you want to move files or copy them to a portable device.  In this case, you want to copy the meta data to the file.

What do you guys think?  Am I the first to stumble upon this?  What do you do about it?

Regards,
Martin

Foobar Design Flaw: Meta data mixed with data

Reply #2 –
Quote from: Web_Engel on
What do you guys think?  Am I the first to stumble upon this?  What do you do about it?
I think you're giving yourself too much credit.
Obviously the authors of foo_custom_info (and it's predecessor Quicktag SQL) thought of this first, which is why the wrote their plugins.

Including DB tagging in the core would violate Foobar's unique policy of minimalism.
"this should be in the core, this should be a components" conversations are petty and pointless.
The Dev Team makes those decisions and the rest of the components are available to us, beyond that why bother?

Your only real point is that there is no undo for file tagging. Which is unfortunate, but (thanks to the Cancel button in the tagger window) not critical.
elevatorladylevitateme

Foobar Design Flaw: Meta data mixed with data

Reply #3 –
Quote from: Web_Engel on
What do you guys think?  Am I the first to stumble upon this?  What do you do about it?


Not much

I think that while undo would be nice it's not a critical feature at all and btw foobar is very well written (have a look at the sdk).

foo_custom_info is somewhat incomplete: a custom info editor like the standard properties panel would be nice and as you describe a way to sync custom info <-> real tags. It can be done using the custom info SDK but nobody cared enough to do it.

Really I'd have trouble using something else than foobar to manage my collection, so don't let you distract by missing undo...

Foobar Design Flaw: Meta data mixed with data

Reply #4 –
Quote
So first of all, this creates unnecessary high data volumes for backup. If I just changed the rating of a file from 3 to 4, I need to backup a 6-meg file. As a result, any user will perform the backups less frequent than needed and not on safe media (i.e. only permanently connected hard drive instead of a CD or Compact Flash or Web folder)


If I add more music to my collection or modify an existing file in the library, it gets added to a "new" folder. Every week Sunday at 12:00am, my external HDD spins up, synchronizes and updates my library and turns off again.

I'm not one of those users.