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Design
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Resolution: Unresolved
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Normal
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Summary
Create a better user design for performing batch operations (i.e. a lot of repetitive edits over a large number of releases) for the user to use and understand how to use it.
Background
The Minidisc release was what started this discussion. The album has 88 tracks; some tracks have the same name but different times. Wikipedia denotes the track titles with appended numbers, but MusicBrainz makes no visual difference in the track title.
In IRC, we figured the best approach was to add an alias to all tracks with duplicate names to follow Wikipedia's standard, and then to add an disambiguation in the recording with the appended number.
However, 88 tracks is a lot to do at once. Better support in the UI/UX to perform these kinds of operations would be helpful for advanced or difficult edits. Others in IRC have scripts that replicate this functionality already. These may be helpful to evaluate for designing the user interface around batch operations. (Edit: One script is set-recording-comments.user.js.)
Details
It's a complicated feature to implement in design. The goals are to simplify its UI and provide both:
- Easy to understand interface with clear options
- Effective documentation / tooltips to explain more complex options
For example, one helpful type of edit I could see is to append a string with an incrementing number across multiple tracks. Pretend I have these three tracks.
1. MusicBrainz Rock 2. MusicBrainz Rock 3. MusicBrainz Rock
In one operation, I would want to append a common string with an incrementing number to all three.
1. MusicBrainz Rock (pt. 1) 2. MusicBrainz Rock (pt. 2) 3. MusicBrainz Rock (pt. 3)
Outcome
The outcome of this feature is to support experienced editors in making advanced edits. While supporting experienced editors, it also helps lower the difficulty of advanced edits for newer editors.