Idea for "integrated folder browsing"

[Taustin Powers]

I like the fact that when you use integrated id3 tag browsing, you don't even notice that you are accessing files from two separate files anymore. But I wish something similar would be possible for filetree browsing.


Here would be my suggestion:

A "Folder Merge" function, that lets you display the contents of two folders merged as one, just in music (or video) browsing mode.

Example:

"D2\music\" has the following contents:

- Foldername_A
- Foldername_B
- Foldername_F
- Foldername_S

"D2_ext\music\" has the following contents:

- Foldername_C
- Foldername_D
- Foldername_T

If you choose to merge these two for browsing, there would be one folder "D2\music_merged" with these contents:

- Foldername_A
- Foldername_B
- Foldername_C
- Foldername_D
- Foldername_F
- Foldername_S
- Foldername_T


Does that make sense? Since you can't copy, move or delete any files while browsing your music, I don't see any problems this could cause...? All you do is browse and pick which file to play, regardless of its location, just when using integrated tag browsing.

Discuss!
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EDIT:
Another approach would be calling it "Virtual Folder". You create a virtual folder, and give it whatever name you wish. Then you browse through your filetree, highlight a folder whose contents you want to display in the virtual folder and click on "Add To VF" in the options menu, just like using the "Add to DPL" feature. That way you could pick as many folders as you like to be merged and displayed in that one "virtual folder".

I think I like this one even better.

[Dominic]

Definitely a good idea and the easiest way I see of doing this is to have a "music" folder on your SD card which contains all you music, like on the D2's actual memory so the D2 would only have to merge whatever is in the music folders

[HueMann]

very good idea. Even better would be a "browser" like on the U10 just for browsing the content on your player and sd card. In this way you could choose to listen to a song, view a photo or watch a movie without going through the main menu to make the switch from one to the other.

[tamanaco]

Isn't this what ID3 browsing is supposed to do?... If you have organized your music files and folders in a structure that reflects some standard of music organization e.g /Genre/Artist/Album/Track ... then ID3 browsing is already allowing you to merge the folders in the D2 and SD card. If you browse by Artist then it will display all the Artist folders in alphabetical order.

Maybe I'm missing something very obvious, but the idea behind ID3 tags and tag browsing is so that DAPs can build small databases of pointers to facilitate the navigation of Media Libraries (music/video) regarless of where they're store in the DAP. These "pointers" point to all the tagged media files in the DAP.

When I want to listen to a track I could not care less where the song is stored. I just want to be able to find it, play it or add it to my Playlist/DPL ASAP.

[Cyberdyskinesia]

Let them fix the important stuff first.

[kaitlyn2004]

Isn't this what ID3 browsing is supposed to do?... If you have organized your music files and folders in a structure that reflects some standard of music organization e.g /Genre/Artist/Album/Track ... then ID3 browsing is already allowing you to merge the folders in the D2 and SD card. If you browse by Artist then it will display all the Artist folders in alphabetical order.

Maybe I'm missing something very obvious, but the idea behind ID3 tags and tag browsing is so that DAPs can build small databases of pointers to facilitate the navigation of Media Libraries (music/video) regarless of where they're store in the DAP. These "pointers" point to all to the tagged media files in the DAP.

When I want to listen to a track I could not care less where the song is stored. I just want to be able to find, play it or added to my Playlist/DPL ASAP.

I have tons of "singles" (no more than 3 songs by an artist). This makes ID3 browsing annoying as hell.

I don't want to browse by album to have a bazillion albums listed which only have a single song. I use folder browsing 100% of the time.

I have my singles on the D2 and my albums on the SD card. Plenty easy for me to find a song quickly.

I do think it would be nice to have a "singles" and an "albums" folder together, as if it were on a 20GB hard drive and not separated between internal and external memory

[tobbis]

It would be a usefull feature for some, not for me though. Cause on my internal memory i only have album from my favourite artist while on the memory card i once every week random 8gb of music with musicPicker (http://www.dkonsult.se/download.aspx) and dont have them sorted in folders.

[snakebite2]

This would be great feature. The ID3 tag browsing is useless to me.
Folder browsing is the fastest way find the song, because you don't have to go through a long list.

[Dalmane98]

Might work for others, but not for me. I use the folder method.

I keep my audio books on the internal memory and all my music and videos on the SDHC card.

I guess it is all about how you organize your files and if you use folder or ID3 tags.

[Taustin Powers]

I guess it's only useful for people, who have their music collection split up between the internal memory and the sd card. My mp3 folder is about 10 gigs big, so it's the only option for me.

I don't like id3 tag browsing for the reasons mentioned by others. I have hundreds of songs by individual artists (i.e. one song per artist), so browsing by artist or album would be a pain in the ass. In my folder structure, all artists whose name begins with an "A" are in a folder called "A", along with subfolders for artist of whom I have complete albums or many songs. So I have one folder for every letter of the alphabet, and then subfolders from there...a lot easier and faster to browse for me than having every single artist listed.

Regardless, there are many people who prefer folder browsing to id3 tag browsing for various reasons (they just created a folder structure that works for them in most cases), and I think this would be a good solution to accomodate them with the "integrated sd card" as well.

To me, the D2 is am mp3 player and nothing else. And to me, the D2 plus sdhc is an mp3 player with a capacity of 12 gigs. And the more you could make it act as such, instead of a player with 4 gigs here and 8 gigs there, the more perfect it will be in my eyes.

[man.dovvn]

It would definitely be useful.

[ManchesterBaby]

It would be quite a nice feature. It kind of goes against the grain of traditional tree structure filesystems, possibly causing some problems however, e.g. if you had a folder or files with the same name on both the internal memory and the sd card - one would have to be renamed somehow (even if that was just in the browser).

Tamanaco is right: the id3 browsing (if it was implemented properly, i.e. with playlists) kind of makes this idea obsolete however. You don't need to know where the stuff is stored, if you had a playlist for each folder then you get everything you get with folder browsing anyway. (The id3 database in the D2 is basically a simple version of the "winfs" content-based filesystem that Microsoft is developing which does away with tree based filesystems completely, replacing them with a database. I don't think your average computer user (or developer) is ready for this yet however - probably one reason why it never made it into Vista!) The only time you really need to know where stuff is when transferring from SD to internal or vice versa (for various reasons), and the D2 can't do that anyway.

To summarise: it would be nice but proper playlist support would make it obsolete and would be better.

[tamanaco]

To summarise: it would be nice but proper playlist support would make it obsolete and would be better.

This is exactly the point that I was trying to make. Individual's folder structures are not a "standard"... I structure my folders and files my way, you structure them your way and the rest of the world does it differently. This is a nightmare from a programmatic point of view. The main source of this problem is the "traditional" DOS drive/folder/filename.ext structure that in large file systems become too conbersome. The future is to build file systems that are "document centric". Let the "FILE" via its header, tag or container define its characteristics and how it should be manipulated within a given system. Well defined "standards" on these headers, tags or containers will take care of the rest. As a user I should be able to place a file in any system and not have to worry about where exactly it is store. Let the file tell the system what it is and how it needs to be manipulated. This is the future... Tags on media files that are indexed in a db and that are manipulated via playlists is an early, simple and still "unpolished" manifestation of this concept.