I am putting together some details for a possible new product, and am after some opinions on the best/most popular play order to use when selecting music. Assuming that we don't have user-selectable options for play order what would you want the play order to be for the following music selections.

Please also assume for now that the music collection consists of only complete albums.

1. Play a particular album - I'm assuming this should be played in original album order

2. Play all from a particular artist
- suggestion 1 - order all tracks alphabetically
- suggestion 2 - order all albums alphabetically and all tracks within albums by original album order
- suggestion 3 - order all albums chronologically and all tracks within albums by original album order

3. Play all from a particular genre or music type
- suggestion 1 - order all tracks alphabetically regardless of album or artist
- suggestion 2 - order all tracks by album (chronologically/alphabetically) then by album order
- suggestion 3 - order all tracks by artist then album (chronologically/alphabetically) then by album order
- suggestion 4 - order all tracks by artist then alphabetically

Any other suggestions gratefully received - these are just for starters! I know this is going to be personal preference, but just say you didn't have a nice PC interface to click and it would be sorted just the way you wanted. I hope to find a logical "best compromise" to start from.

Thanks in advance for any help you can give.

Nick

Here's how I normally listen to music:

1. Song's from a single genre evenly distributed between artists (which can be done with the Empeg).

2. All albums at random, but tracks in order once an album is selected.

3. All songs by a selected artist, in chronological order of album and track order.

- suggestion 3 - order all albums chronologically and all tracks within albums by original album order

Consider compilation albums. Some people (myself included) like to tag each track with the original release date. This means that an album doesn't necessarily have a release date. This makes them hard to order chronologically.

Other people, of course, tag each of the tracks in the compilation album with the date that the compilation was released.

Hmmm...

If we go with only the data automatically tagged from the CDDB, is there anything there which gives the album date rather than individual track dates? I know the date tag is sporadic at best.

I'd have to say that alphabetically is never the right way to order any music for which you have any other criteria. I'd almost suggest album cover color would be a better criterion.

I tag compilation tracks with original release dates, but usually I exclude compilation albums from playlists that include whole albums (If I want to listen to all of my Rush albums, I don’t include Chronicles in the list). Unless I select a compilation album deliberately, those tracks usually only get played when I’m in mode #1 (See my first post). Of course if the user has no control over the lists at all, there’s no way to know the difference between a compilation album and normal albums, so I guess it’s all a moot point.

On the product itself there will be no real control like that over the lists. For those "advanced" users who connect the unit to emplode, custom playlists could be created but I need to consider a good compromise for the less organised user!

is there anything there which gives the album date

Sorta, kinda. Read on for more info (and a minor rant):

The unfortunate thing about CDDB (and its ilk) is the strange confusion between whether albums or tracks are the first-class citizens. To see what I mean, consider this: CDDB only allows an artist for the album, which means that people are forced to enter "Various" (or some theme thereof), and put "Artist / Title" in the track name field. This completely breaks things for compilations (particularly when nobody can agree on which way round to put the artist and title, or whether to use hyphen or slash as the separator). Now, IIRC, CDDB does the same thing with the year -- one per album. Again this breaks compilation albums.

However, ID3 treats the file as the first-class citizen. This means that each file can have a separate year -- which works great for compilations, but breaks your ordering query, since we can't tell (in the general case), which year an album should be filed under -- that information was lost when transferring the CDDB information into the ID3 tags.

Moreover, there's no easy way to actually collect MP3 files into albums, since there's no accepted way to uniquely identify an album, and to stash this information in the ID3 tags. Oh, sure, ID3 does define some fields that can be used for this purpose. Nobody uses them.

Then, it gets even more complicated when you consider multi-CD albums (particularly concept albums), because they ought to be played as a coherent unit, but there's nothing in the TOC or CDDB information to tie them together. This, again, is a matter of personal preference -- I don't particularly mind if I've got "Disc 1" and "Disc 2", but some people do.

And, no, you can't use the album title to collect the tracks -- I've got at least 3 albums called "Greatest Hits" in my collection.

Now, if we're talking about a closed-box system, we can collect the album together, because we ripped all of the tracks at the same time, but things start to get messy when you allow other applications to add tracks to the collection.

Bah. Rant over. For now.

That's a toughie... it depends on the situation... but...

1 right
2. 3 would be best of those options. Generally i'd either want that or completely random.
3. 3 again

that would be how i'd listen to them... like i said, either all in order alphabetically if by artist, chronologically if by album, and album order if by song OR completely random.

Consider compilation albums. Some people (myself included) like to tag each track with the original release date.

Roger, remember who you're talking to here. It's probably an in-car product that rips CDs and doesn't have a lot of easy track editing features.

Yeah, I know that. I was just pointing out that if you do allow people to upload more music with an emplode-like application, then that music is probably going to be tagged the way that they want it, and it gets confusing from that point on.

As I also pointed out, provided that it's a closed-box system, the CDDB data holds the year for the CD, so that ordering mode is feasible. Maybe my post wasn't clear enough on that point.

the CDDB data holds the year for the CD

Sometimes.

The main target consumer for this product will be someone who will not use a PC for music organisation. It is intended to be a simple-to-use whopping great CD-changer really. It is aimed at people who have a standard or aftermarket head unit in their car which can control a CD-changer, and would like to put all their CDs in the car. We want to try and make the main interface something suitable to this type of user and application.

The main unit of music will be the album - the user can select one or many albums to play, but not go straight to individual tracks. Whole CDs are ripped at once, so they can be categorised okay. The user can select by album name, artist name and "type". "Type" will be like CDDB genre, but the user can choose it for each CD when they rip it - the CDDB genres are too varied and ultimately not that useful. This way users can categorise music however they like. Year info was deemed too unreliable for music selection (but could still be used for ordering music).

The ordering question comes in when the user has selected multiple albums (say - all albums by "James"). Year data (if available and correct) would allow us to then give them a tour through the history of the band (More likely, it will start with a few albums without year info, and then order the rest), or we could use a more arbitrary alphabetical list. Most users may not realise what they are getting!

For these users, I want to try and make a good guess at what will confuse/annoy them the least!

The complication starts to come in, when people add their own, already-ripped and tagged files. The easiest way for most would be to put in their MP3-CDs and let the unit copy them across. This will give us the same issues as an emplode-like transfer (although I reckon the average emplode user is actually more likely to have sanitised their ID3 tags).

With an MP3-CD transfer we could either use the ID3 tags for each track as they are (and probably have a lot of effectively one track albums) or we could do a few things to keep the same spirit of the album as the unit of music and try not to end up with a huge list of artists/albums. The user would have to compile the MP3-CD with it in mind, but we could use folders as album names (allows them to create their own compilation albums easily) or similar schemes. Do we think the average user of this sort of product will be happier to make CDs using the file structure to categorise the music, or to make sure all their ID3 tags are correct?

The emplode user is the trickiest - I would like to leave this option there for those who want to use it. I think that artist and album tags are likely to be reliable, so the music selection side shouldn't be too affected - although the implementation of the "type" idea needs to be considered. If it is only the play order that is affected, it may be something we have to work around.

Of course, there is always the option of advanced or hidden menus that allow the user to select between all these different ways of doing things.....

the user can select one or many albums to play

I couldn't get on with that, going back to mixing cassettes from LP's to play in the car, I take a cherry-picking approach, even with the CD Changer in the boot I could shuffle tracks from all ten albums: On the Empeg, I have a core playlist, shuffled/least played, which is favourite tracks from all the albums in my collection.

Additionally, I have playlists:

Wife in car.
Daughter in car
Wife & Daughter in car
Wife & Daughter in car when I'm not.
Each of those is a combination of 2 of theplaylists, the penultimate 3
Additionally I have the 6 most recently purchased CD's
Every couple of months, I move the good tracks from the CD's to the main playlist, delete them and add new.

I have all sorts of other stuff loaded, but not relevant to this thread.

If I hadn't bought the Empeg, I would probably be your target customer.

There's a couple of things here.

Shuffle - When the head unit enables shuffle (usually it is either on or off so we can't get too complex), the unit will shuffle all the tracks in the current selection. i.e. if you select an album, it will play all the tracks in the album shuffled. If you select an artist it will shuffle all tracks from all albums by that artist, and the same for "type".

Recent albums - one of the buttons on the head unit is the "play last ripped album" button. Repeat presses of this steps back through the albums in reverse-ripped order.

Tracks you don't like - although we rip entire CDs for ease, you can delete the current track or current album. This means you can pare albums down to just the tracks you like. Unfortunately, that means they are not available at all. Still keeping the album (or part album) as the smallest unit. If we get into track management, complexity becomes too much to do with this interface.

"playlists" - the "type" id is user-defined (although we may have some in there to start with). The user can delete them or add new ones, so you can have the "Daughter in car" type as well as "hardcore thrash" type (if that does it for you ). You can move or copy whole albums (or what is left of them) between playlists, so they can be used as a kind of cross between playlists and genres. Moving/copying albums between "types" would be done only at the remote unit (probably when you first add the CD), to avoid complicating the head unit interface. This would hopefully do almost what you want, although you still couldn't select only a few tracks from any particular album without deleting the rest.

For those users who start fresh with no current mass music storage, this would be fairly easy to do. As each CD goes in, they can put it in whatever categories they see fit. It is a bit more laborious if they want to dump 10Gb of music in to start with though!

There are a couple of advanced possibilities that could be set in the remote unit. Onet would be to allow the user to select what random meant when the head unit selected it. It could be true random, or least played or etc...

Any alternatives always considered

Thanks

Nick

although I reckon the average emplode user is actually more likely to have sanitised their ID3 tags

Don't assume that.

The average empeg car owner will probably have done this because we here on the BBS keep pounding everyone over the head with it, but not the average owner of the device you're describing.

The user would have to compile the MP3-CD with it in mind, but we could use folders as album names (allows them to create their own compilation albums easily) or similar schemes. Do we think the average user of this sort of product will be happier to make CDs using the file structure to categorise the music, or to make sure all their ID3 tags are correct?

Why does it have to be one or the other? Why not all?

A clever piece of software could make a pretty good educated guess, by examining these four elements and comparing/contrasting them:

- ID3V2 tag
- ID3V1 tag
- Folder structure and folder names
- File names

... and decide which of those things actually represent the proper categorization for the song. It could decide whether folder structure is artist/album and go from that. It could parse the file name and see if it falls into a pattern that indicates artist-album or album-artist or if the file name contains the track number, etc. It could see if the file has synched V1/V2 tags and if not, which fields were missing in which tag, and could decide the reliability factor of a given tag.

If it is only the play order that is affected, it may be something we have to work around.

And let me just chime in with my personal opinion that, by default, no songs should ever play in alphabetical order by song title. When the album-order is known, always default to album-order (and chronological album order for multiple albums if possible) in any sequential playback.

because we here on the BBS keep pounding everyone over the head with it

We do? Crap, I haven't been pulling my weight. Sorry.

My mistake - I meant the average emplode user at the moment, which I guess really means the average EMPEG car owner!

The reason I want to try and get just one way of adding MP3-CDs (or a user-selectable scheme) rather than a clever analytical system is that I want to sell to automotive OEMs - aftermarket first to show them it's good! For that market, anything that might possibly confuse the user is a problem - a clever system might categorise one way for one CD, and another way for the next. A lot of OEM users would not understand this and that gives us a warranty return. I know this sounds surprising, but we get returns and complaints for not being able to see how to eject a tape, or how come the radio can still be turned on when the car ignition is off (we have a 1-hour timed mode when the igintion is off for convenience). And with the volumes OEMs buy, even a small percentage return/complaint rate is a big issue for them.

We could give the user a choice of ways to categorise off the MP3-CD, but I think automatically choosing would cause problems. They need to understand it quickly.

Please feel free to keep pounding me over the head, by the way - it is the only way I learn!

Thanks

I just wanted to say that I feel your pain about dealing with end-users. I work with users every day who just don't "get it". One of the things our program must have is a listing of personnel. In order to make this simple, the programmers before me added the ability to import personnel from a comma-delimited file (csv). Many users, however, don't have their personnel in csv files, they have them in MS Excel (xls). So a large number of people would still enter names in by hand (a tedious task) rather than export from Excel into csv files. When our help desk would explain how to do this, they would say, "that's too complicated, why won't it just read Excel files?"

When I started working here one of my first tasks was to allow our import to read Excel files, and now the users think I am a programming god! I like to complain about them and say "these people shouldn't be using our program," but in the end, if only technically savvy people used software then most developers wouldn't have jobs.

For that market, anything that might possibly confuse the user is a problem - a clever system might categorise one way for one CD, and another way for the next.

I understand what you're saying, but I was saying that the very problem you're afraid of could theoretically be solved with good software.

My idea was to write a piece of software that was so good at determining the organization/categorization from the various possible ways of naming/tagging files, that the end-user would never have to choose or be confused by it. It would be completely transparent and work almost all the time. Provided that the disk you fed it had at least some semblance of organization (as opposed to just a random selection of files without tags or proper file names), I think it's theoretically possible.

Of course, this is easier said than done. But if you've got a relatively recent copy of the CDDB as one of your possible pieces of reference material, I believe it could be done.

For instance, when faced with a loose MP3 file that has no tag and is named:

"Some words - Some words - Some words.mp3"

the software has no way of determining, all by itself, which of those "words" is an artist, which is an album, and which is a track title. However, a quick scan through the CDDB (with some fuzzy matching to get around misspellings and "The" discrepancies) would (in most cases) give a high probabilty match that a given field is an artist and a given field is an album. Even better, if you scanned for the track length of that MP3, you might even be able to get an exact match and be able to populate its tracknumber field.

The above example could be extrapolated to directory names and poorly/partially tagged files. And it's more complicated than the examples I've cited, because what if the artist name contains a hypen. But I believe that some really clever parsing software, combined with database searches, could do it.

As the CDDB copy gets older and more outdated, this would begin to work less and less reliably, so that's a problem that would need to be dealt with. You'd need to make sure that the software failed gracefully in situations where it doesn't find a CDDB match, and it just makes the best educated guess it can.

I'm with you on the ideal answer - maybe we can get it in. I need to see what the people who know what it might take to do this stuff think, and then pray to the god of resources to let us do it!

Unfortunately, I suspect we will probably not be able to get everything we want in, and this may be one of the first casualties.

Who knows though

Cheers!