I am wondering the purpose of Collections and Volumes. I have read the related section in the on-line Help (http://www.helium-music-manager.com/collections-and-volumes/), but it seems to me quite useless.
I mean, what is it good for, to separate my audio files into Collections and Volumes? If I want to organize my audio files according to something not in the default properties set, I can still use the 5 custom user fields. There is no difference between renaming Custom Field 1 to Category, and set it to e.g Humor, Children Music, Light Music, or anything, and selecting it in the Music Explorer or using Collections and Volumes to achieve the same effect. The only difference is, that Collections and Volumes are related to the Folder Structure.
To make it clear, I'll show you my Collections and Volumes setup:
Sorted Audio
- AudioBooks
- Humor
- Radio Recordings
- Children Music
- Classical Music
- Light Music
- Scores and Soundtracks
- AudioBooks
- Children audio
- Humor
- New Music
- Unknown Music
So my concept was, to separate the Musics from other Audio files, to separate the properly tagged and structured files from the files still not organized (Sorted/Unsorted) using the Volumes and to separate my files by other Aspects, which I don't want to use or listen at the same time, eg. Light Music and Classical Music. These file are in separate folders on my HDD, so it was easy to set up the different Collections and Volumes.
But my problem is, that this Collections and Volumes structure seems to me quite useless. I can't achieve, what I want, in fact to be able to handle these files separated, but together as well. It is because, if I want to handle them separated way, I can create multiple databases, and switch between them. But in that case I cant see global statistics about my audio usage, eg. in Music Browser view. Or if I want to handle them together, what this whole Collections and Volumes thing is good for? I can use no Collections and Volumes (in fact one collection and one volume).
So the way Collections and Volumes are implemented at the moment, gives no more functionality than using Custom user fields or different databases.
The only benefit for me, that it is possible to filter by Collections and Volumes quiet easy, as the filters in different views has an easy to set up, check-box based field for this information.
But:
- There are no filter available in Search and Music Explorer view. Why? I think it would be essential, to choose in which Collections and Volumes I want to search, and to choose, if I want to see my statistics for only a specified volume, or more or the whole my library.
- On the other hand, it seems to me, that it is against the whole concept, that the filters are not synchronized between views. Provided that at the moment I only want to work with my Sorted Light Music, and none of the unsorted, or the other kind of audio files, there should be a way, to select that Collection and Volume, somewhere in a more general place in the User Interface, than in the views, since I want to use that collection(s) and volumes(s), while I can switch between different views.
So I think, that Collections and Volumes would be really useful, if the Collections and Volumes field would be moved from each view's filter panel, to a view independent place, eg. next to the global search filed, and would be applied to each view, until it is set the way I set it up.
I can't find any apparent reason, to independently filter by Collections and Volumes the Music Explorer, the Artists and the Albums views, and to not be able to filter the Music Browser, and the Search views.
Please, can someone from Intermedia describe me, what was the concept behind Collections and Volumes implemented the way it is, or if my opinion is against some greater concepts of Helium Music Manager? Thank you very much, in advance!
