Designing your collection

Renaming

When you double-click on a file or directory, a text box will pop, allowing you to type a new name for the clicked file or directory. When you're finished typing the new name, you can click away or press return to perform the rename.

Dragging around

You can drag files and directory around, moving them at will. You can also drag from and to the ignore box. There is a special trick with dragging, and it is the Command key. If you hold the Command key when you start a drag operation, the selected item's children will be dragged. And if the same Command key if held when you end a drag operation (when you drop the thing), the dragged item(s) will be moved as siblings of the drop destination instead of its child.

For example, if you have 2 similar directories in your Design Board: "White Stripes" and "The White Stripes". You say to yourself "Hey! I want these directories merged!". You could expand the "White Stripes" directory, select all it's children, and drag them into the "The White Stripes" directory, but you could also hold Command, drag the "White Stripes" directory, release the Command key, and drop it into the "The White Stripes" directory.

Creating Folders

There is a feature in the Design menu called New Folder. Clicking on this menu item will create a new folder in the currently selected folder. If nothing is selected, the folder will be created directly in the design board. The created folder will automatically go in rename mode so you can type a new name right away.

Removing empty folders

There are good chances that you will end up with a lot of empty folders when you will design your collection. There is a feature in the Design menu called Remove Empty Folders. When you click on it, all empty folders are removed recursively.

The Ignore Box

Files cannot be removed individually from the design board. They can only be removed in bulk when you remove a location by unchecking it in the locations pane. However, they can be ignored. All files that are dragged into the ignore box will not be materialized. So this is quite like if they were removed, but you can still bring them back if you want.

Conflicts

When 2 files or more have the same name and are in the same directory, there is a naming conflict. When this happens, the conflictual file's name is prepended by [xxx] where xxx is a sequence (example: [000], [001], [002]). The parent directory (as well as grandparents) of a conflicted file gains a special icon with a red exclamation mark.

Having conflictual files does not prevent you from materializing your design, but it is not recommended, because it does not make a very graceful collection design. As soon as the conflict is gone, the little red mark goes away.

The order in which you add locations to the design board is important for automatic conflict resolution happening in Mass Rename. The sooner you add a location, the higher its files' priority will be in conflict resolution. That means that if you add location A before location B and the mass rename renames 2 files from each of these location to the same name, the file from location B will get the "conflicted" status.

Switch Conflict And Original

To create a conflict, it takes at least two songs. And among the songs creating a conflict, one of them will not be considered "conflicted". And sometimes, it isn't the right one. When it happens, just select the song that shouldn't be conflicted, and use this command. It is just a shortcut for renaming both songs.

Move Conflicts

This feature simply takes all conflicted files, and move them into a folder named "conflicts" in the ignore box. If for some reason, the song that created the conflict (and didn't get a conflicted name) isn't there anymore, the conflicted song will simply take it's place instead of going to the ignore box. There is a How To page about resolving conflicts.

Move Conflicts *and* Original

Like Move Conflicts, but it also moves the song that wasn't renamed to a conflicted name (if it's still there and if it hasn't been renamed).

Mass Rename

The Mass Rename feature will re-organize all your design board according to a naming model you will give to it. When you click on Menu|Design|Mass Rename, a window will pop asking for a naming model. You can select one of the pre-defined ones, or you can make your own custom one. To design your own model, see the Naming Models section.

The popped window also lets you choose a whitespace policy. For example, you might have an inconsistent collection, and have some files with an Artist tag value of "The White Stripes", and some with an Artist tag value of "The_White_Stripes". If you select "Leave the as is", 2 directories will be created, and each file will be in it's own directory. If you select "Replace all whitespaces with underscores", all files will go under a single directory, named "The_White_Stripes". And if you select "Replace all underscores with a space character", all files will go under a single directory, named "The White Stripes".

At the bottom of the window, there is a preview of what the rename operation will look like. You can change the example song by clicking on "Change Example Song". A new, song will then be randomly chosen.

Split into CD/DVD

This feature is really nice. It will split your design board into chunks of pre-determined size. This will then allow you to use the CD/DVD recording feature of the Materialize wizard. You should be finished renaming and moving your files around before using this feature, because once the design board is splitted, it is more touchy to move files around (because you have to stay below your media capacity).

Like the Mass Rename feature, a window will pop when you click on Split into CD/DVD. Like with Mass Rename You have to choose a naming model for the to-be-created CDs. You can select a pre-defined model or make your own, after having read the Naming Models section.

Then you have to choose the size of the chunks you want to make. This, of course, all depends on what kind of recorder you have.

Ahh, the grouping level. Another niceness. If you try to split your board by letting the grouping level be at 0, you might notice that some artists and albums will end up on different CDs. If your absolute goal is to record your collection on as few CDs as possible, it is good. But otherwise, it's kind of a pain. If you move the grouping level slider one tick to the right, the level will be 1. And at 1, no directory will be splitted between CDs. This is nice, but it might lead you to record significantly more CDs. You can move the slider one more tick to the right, and have a grouping level of 2. In this case, top level directories can be splitted, but not their subdirectories. If you have an Artist/Album naming model, it means that you can have the same artist on 2 CDs, but never the same album. The righter is the slider, the smaller the groups will be. And if the slide is at the extreme left, no grouping will take place. If your grouping level is greater than the deepness of your directory structure, a "(No folder as this level)" message will be displayed, which means that no grouping will take place.