Suggest changes to winamps default config

[MrSinatra]

hey all and esp Devs,

i've been meaning to post this for quite some time. i would like to suggest the following changes be made to winamps default configuration. hopefully you will do as many of them as possible:

CHANGE #1

add a default "Genres" smartview to the other smartviews

you already have "Audio" "Recently Played" and so on... i am saying add one called Genres, that has 3 top panes and a bottom tracks pane.

The top left is Genres, midde is Album Artists, and right is Art icons.

simple, but currently missing! why not have it by default and show the power of browsing by genre by default???

CHANGE #2

add "Album Artists" as a default column to the bottom tracks pane

right now, you only get Artists, left justified. I think its high time for Album Artist to be the first, left justified column, followed by Artists second.

people need to know its there and to use it. hiding it from them only confuses them, more so than exposing it would.

most rippers, including winamp, these days use unique artist per track, (thank god). however AA support is spotty, but used or not used, either way, it needs exposed so users can see WHY things group together or not, esp for artwork.

CHANGE #3

turn off the guessing!

in watch folders, you have to turn off the metadata "guessing" to see whats really in your tags. i know back when winamp was started that this was useful and practically necessary, but not today. this should be an opt-in feature, not an opt-out one. again, hiding reality from the users at this point is overall more confusing to them, then not doing so.

so the default for the "configure" button AND any newly added folders should be "no guessing." (and "any" instead of "all")

in addition, using "artist as album artist" should also be opt-in, not opt-out. users are unaware of these options and do NOT intuitively expect them to exist. and besides, the option if on, can really mess up your exp!

please let me know what you think.

thanks!

[Aminifu]

Hi MrSinatra,

The first 2 proposed changes I would not object to. Users can do this for themselves, but it will take a while for some to realize that they can and for others to gain the courage to change the defaults. I'm not sure that all users understand that the default views are smartviews.

The 1st proposal does help further show the utility of smartviews. The 2nd proposal would be a help for those with many compilation and duet albums.

For me, the artist and album artist tag data are almost always the same, or I make them so for the few songs I have from compilations and such. So I would just change the middle panel to artist for the Genres view and remove the album artist column to keep from having duplicate info listed side by side.

As for the 3rd proposed change, I completely agree that the metadata "guessing" should be opt-in instead of opt-out. While "guessing" ensures the media library will have some data to work with, "guessing" does more harm than good, imo.

I thought "Use Artist as Album Artist if not available" was already opt-in. It's been so long since I enabled it, I don't remember. I know the album artist tag can be useful for some, it's just not very useful for me.

On the other hand I would understand if nothing is changed. Users rely too much on intuition and default configurations. We all need to read the docs and at least look at all the options, to get the full value from the apps we use. Even more so in the case of Winamp, because of all it can do on its own and with 3rd party plug-ins.