hey guys,
I thought I might chime in here and hopefully offer some input.
I've read through your posts and your idea is good, however I believe you guys are thinking too small, and also a bit too basic.
Essentially all you are asking for is the ability to house more metadata for your songs. SKP obviously already has DB's for its basic song database management, however as we are all aware, at the moment its just basic, which is fine as it does exactly what it needs to do.
From a programming perspective, having the devs introduce the items that you want, sticking with SKP's existing 'on/off' methodology for a lot of its options, in my opinion, is a pretty inefficient way to do it. Also your idea to add a checkboxes for this and a checkboxes for that, along with drop down lists is just crazy, and will only clutter up the UI even more. The UI already has checkboxes and fields everywhere, we don't want to clutter it up even more ..... It would be far more efficient and beneficial for the devs to put control back into the hosts hands, with regards to metadata and song specific information, rather than having to keep adding one thing after the other, each time someone wants a new type of meta data field etc.
So my suggestion is for the introduction of tags .... they are simple, but ultra effective, take up literally no space, and YOU are in full control of what YOU want to tag things with. If any of you are MacOS or Linux users, then you already know what I'm talking about.
So using the example below:
how about this idea....stay with me through the full explanation and this will all come together....
Piotr, this is something that i know others deal with as well on all hosting platforms....explicit songs at private events and family shows.
what if in manage song database, some more columns are added.
*decade* (great for theme nights, but also people will ask "what do you have for 80's rock?", just a dropdown would work)
*genre* (several columns would be great with dropdowns for multiple selections like AC/DC would fall under Rock, Hard Rock, & Classic Rock)
*Duet* (people CONSTANTLY ask what we have for duets. a checkbox would do fine here)
*Language* (also, get asked what we have for Spanish music. another dropdown)
*explicit* (mark a song as having explicit lyrics. another simple check box)
here's how easy it would be with tags, literally would take how ever long for you to type them out, create separate tags for:
80s, Rock, Hard Rock, Classic Rock, Duet, Spanish, Explicit
Then devs would create a corresponding function to then be able to apply those tags in bulk across your song library, and allow you to specify search filters to identify tracks you wish to apply those tags to.
For example:
Step 1: "Please select the tags you wish to apply"
So you select "90s, Rock, English, Clean"
Step 2: "Please select the tracks you wish to apply the tags to"
In this step you should be able to filter using multiple criteria that you specify.
i.e. Name contains "Nirvana" and 'filename prefix' + ' begins with' "SF, SFMW, SFG" .... this would result only in tracks starting with sunfly based prefixes and has Nirvana in them.
Step 3 - Select the tracks within the results, either Select All, or just specific ones.
Step 4 - Apply.
Step 5 - Rinse and Repeat.
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The above is a crude example, but you get the idea, the tags would also be searchable to find songs too. So if you wanted to find all your SoundChoice Country songs from the 90's, search with the tags:
90s, Country, SoundChoice.
Also another thing that is often overlooked, is that metadata for most of these tracks will already exist for the original songs, on many platforms like Discogs, MusicBrainz, Picard, Amazon Music etc .... But no karaoke software to date seems to tap into that to assist the hosts in either cleaning up their libraries, or adding extra data to them. But thats a conversation for another day.
So thats my idea for what I believe is a much better solution to song library metadata management, and putting the control back in the hosts hands. It could also be another big step in setting SKP apart from the other 'big 4' karaoke software vendors.
Cheers!
Daniel