Improved "Extended Tags" Display

General Discussion
1

Without going into a lengthy discussion of why this is very important to us, I'd like to request what we believe is a simple change to the way the Extended Tag panel is designed. The change suggested would allow more tag fields to be displayed at once, without the need to scroll up and down.

We apply extended tags to FLAC files using additional field names in addition to those included in the standard set of Vorbis comments. As a result, we find the Extended Tag display frequently cannot display all of the embedded tags. In extreme cases, just a few tags are hidden and can only be seen by manipulating the vertical scroll button that appears when there are more tags than the window can display.

For training and marketing purposes, we would like to be able to display ALL of the tags in the window at once, without having to scroll up and down to see them. This would make it possible to display more tags in a single screenshot, avoiding the need to take two sreenshots to convey the concept and obvious advantage of embedding more and better higher-quality tags.

We suggest the following changes to make the display area taller so that all of the tags can be seen at once:

  1. Remove the word "Metadata" at the very top of the tag display and if desired, place it in the blue bar at the top, where it currently says "Tags." Otherwise, these two words are essentially redundant and unnecessary.

  2. Move these buttons into two rows on the right hand side of the window: OK, <<, >>, Cancel. We suggest putting the two "arrow" buttons above the OK and Cancel buttons.

  3. Then extend the vertical height of the tag display area so that it occupies the maximum space available top to bottom. Doing so would permit at least five or six additional lines of metadata to be displayed without the need to scroll up and down.

I've included a screenshot to illustrate our problem. What you can't seen in the screenshot are two tags that are very important: WWWLABEL and YEAR.

There may be additional or other ways to display more tags at once. For example, the display text size could be reduced by, say, two points, to permit more lines of metadata to be displayed.

"d2b" aka Dennis

Sample_Screenshot.png1187×1145 178 KB

2

Have you tried to tilt your flatscreen monitor by 90 degrees so that the vertical resolution is higher than the horizontal? Most graphic cards support that.
I think that this would be easier than to redesign this dialogue.
The extended tags dialogue could then be adapted to the new layout.

Have you thought about generating an export that shows the fields similar to the extended tags dialogue?
There, you could get the headline, font size and all the other stuff the way you like.

Edit: I just noticed that this was my 7000th post. I like round numbers.

3

Gee, I missed this response! Sorry.

Yes, on occasion I have rotated the screen to get a longer view of the "Alt+T" metadata, but with dual monitors in a limited space on the workstation tables, this is quite difficult just to be able to take a screen shot.

A script to export the list would be great, but I have no idea how to create even a simple list in a text file format that I could then edit and save as a PDF.

Thanks for the suggestion!

Dennis, aka "d2b".

4

Please let me clarify my response above. I don't know how to create a script that will generate a text file containing all of the music file's FLAC tag field names and their values.

Dennis, aka "d2b"

5

have a look at the help and the $list() function:

Here is a small export script:

$filename(New export file.txt,utf-8) $loop(%_filename%)$list($char(13)$char(10),:,) $loopend()

6

Thank you. This works pretty well as it is.