by rubbersoul » Thu Aug 25, 2011 12:10 am
yeah i agree. it's an outdated way to do things, but it has its advantages, two being ease of implementation and initial flexibility for the user.
i love having my music sorted by artist, and then by album chronologically. this organization method can be done with tags of course, but seldom ever is. nearly every single android music player is based on tags and hardly any support sorting your albums chronologically. some people may like to throw in additional organizational wildcards like separating lp, ep, compilation, single, etc. the best way to provide maximum flexibility is to use tags to sort, and allow the user to customize the sort by those tags (foobar2000 does this); this is particularly powerful when you allow for custom tags and multi-value tags. i do not know of a single android music player that supports this however, as tag-based players simply allow you to browse your library by track, artist, album, or genre (maybe multi-valued). the reason for this, i suspect, is that it would be arduous to code.
by using folder organization, you give control to the user to organize as they please with some limitations (multi-value is one example that you pointed out, another would be switching back and forth between browsing by artist, or by genre, or by decade...). i agree that tags are better, but the fact of the matter is tags aren't implemented, and there are some advantages to using folders. use the tools that are available to you to make the best of the situation. if it is so important, like i said, there are other similar services that offer that sort of support (sorry, haha). telling the developer that this needs to be the number one priority probably isn't going to do anything to sway him one way or another.