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Windows Media Player Auto Playlist where's the comments tag?

3K views 2 replies 1 participant last post by  BobbyD123 
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Yesterday I finally got down to organizing my mp3s. I 've so far been very weary of any automated options of arranging my mp3s (which are in the number of hundreds of thousands - avid music fan that I am). Reason being that most of the time if you rely on computers to automate tasks that are too complex for them to do so, you put too much time in yourself for very mediocre results. In the good old days (before reluctantly making the transition to mp3) I had my cds (sleeveless) in a some 200 cd per case folders and I let my brain do the work of mentally sorting out where everything is or what I want to listen. In any case, I am diverging here, sorry for that, yesterday I decided to make the move.

First of all I've long been waiting for vista for what was supposed to be the virtual folder features and ended up being the stacks. So I coughed up 400 euros or so for vista ultimate. I should have expected that the useless hacks (not in the computer wiz sense of course) that they are over at microsoft they would have messed up this much touted feature, I just didn't think that they'd come up with such a sad excuse of "tagging". Once again near monopoly forced me to give them the benefit of the doubt.

What a horrid mess. Gonne are the adjunct files for file types that don't support metadata as was the case in windows xp, and it seems that the only files you can tag are docs and xls, some picture formats, a handfull in total, thus rendering the stacks, or virtual folders nothing more than hot air. That's just great. To add insult to injury you can't tag folders. That's what happens when the government is on the payroll of microsoft and instead of splitting it apart they let this huge monstrocity of a company sit on the backs of well pretty much everyone using a computer in the world. But again I'm diverging.

The missing folder tagging option, was the main reason I payed up the enourmous amount for vista in the first place. Of course everyone was too hush hush on the web or too much of a technofreak to mention a few simple details on the actual functionality of the os. Tagging folders which in music files are the equivanent of a cd sleeve, an album, was what I was expecting. I 'd tag each of my albums with a few words and then arrange them in virtual folders any way I pleased based on the tags. Of course such a simple intuitive feature was too much too ask for, but I am once again furious that I've been mislead by microsoft.

Which brings me on to actually going in to wm 11 yesterday and trying out a simple auto playlist. I started selecting the first criteria and lo and behold there was no comments field available (?!?!?!?!?!!!!) to set as a criterium. You could get anything from the composer's pet name to his brand of toothpast, but one of the most common and used fields, the comments was absent. ARE THESE GUYS IN THEIR RIGHT MINDS? Sure they are geeks, take a look at Bill Gates you wouldn't want him as your gardener let alone your software provider, sure there's a lot of dirt one can dig up on ms, but being so damn inane? I searched the web and couldn't find anyone mentioning the absence of the comments field in the criteria? You add a few comments on your music file such as the mood, several subgenres etc. etc. and you want to make a playlist containing these. Where is it then?

But on the other hand comments appear in the searches and you can stack them based on these comments!!! Besides their being rather slow they are also schizoid at ms. In the searches there is also a tag field when you search mp3s but this tag feature is untouchable, you cannot edit it, you can't do anything about it. Now aren't mp3's taggable files, files that can't handle any metadata you might want to add? Then why can't you tag them as you would with a .doc file? One can argue for example that ms is not to blame for not including non metadata enabled files in their stacks (although all the wait for vista should have enabled them to come up with something, and I have a lot of friend who copiously tagged their text files with the xp system that is now all worthless in vista, that would give a good beating to the ms exec. who rendered their one system defunct). But mp3 are fully capable, why then doesn't the os let me tag them?

This is a parody really. Anyone who has similar experiences and can shed some light is welcome.
 
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