MP3rat Introduction Chapter 1

Thank you for purchasing or evaluating MP3rat, a powerful and easy to use MP3 player, playlist manager, tag editor, and organizer with an innovative search facility that makes even large collections of songs manageable and accessible. In addition to making your music collection easier to manage, some of MP3rat's other features include the ability to check song statuses, control external players, move, copy, and rename songs, along with a filename parse function to extract song properties from the filename format. 

 

1.1 Features

• Super fast search technology - nothing is faster, easier to use or more convenient.
• Fast operation for large collections of songs. MP3rat can easily handle collections in excess of 30,000 mp3s.
• ID3v2 and ID3v1 tag editing support
• External player support (Winamp, MusicMatch, RealPlayer, Windows Media Player, Default Windows Player )
• Full Drag and Drop support to easily organize playlists
• Playlist window to easily create, edit, and manage Playlists
• Contains internal player with a straight forward easy-to-use interface
• Easily categorize songs with more than 15 available song properties 
• Filename extraction of song properties
• Rename files based on song properties
• Move and copy feature to assist in managing song collections
• Customizable Song Properties viewer
• Easily accessible rating and properties editor for the current playing song
• System Tray integration
• Rating field for each song
• Color code songs based on rating
• Customize colors and create rating gradients
• Shuffle option for the playlist order 
• Ability to delete MP3 songs and send them to the recycle bin
• Dictionary window for easy viewing and editing of keywords
• Track the number of times a song is listened to so viewing your most popular songs is easy
• Status Checking of songs to determine if they are available
• Import Wizard 
• Show the run time and total size for playlists, useful if you have a portable MP3 player
• Auto Import on startup feature to automatically add new songs from a music swapping services
• Automatic saves
• Install and Uninstall support
• Repeat and Random player options
• Global Hotkeys to activate the MP3rat program
• Complete Unicode ID3v2 tag support
• Copy Keyword Dictionary to clipboard

1.2 How MP3rat Works

MP3rat does not store songs in folders, instead, they are stored in a flat, nonhierarchical list. As a replacement for folders, MP3rat uses keywords and an instantaneous search facility. Searching occurs as each character is typed so only a few keystrokes are needed to locate any song.

MP3rat will create a list of song properties that categorize each song:

Title	Artist	Album
Filename	Keywords	Comments
Disk Label	Track Number	Year
Rating	Run Time	Status
Bitrate	Listen Count	Add Date

Song Properties are populated from the MP3 tag data when the song is added to MP3rat database during an import. Instead of using the song tag to store the information, MP3rat keeps track of these properties in a separate database. The keywords search facility that makes MP3rat unique is fully customizable.  Aside from being able to quickly search and locate music from the song properties, such as Artist, Album, or Title, you can also create a subset of keywords to further characterize your music, for example:

Rock, Easy, Pop, Jazz, Classical...

Then add any other categories, in this case adding an era will further help define songs:

50's, 60's, 70's, 80's, 90's, 00's

That way when you feel like listening to Rock music, you can just type "Rock". If you want to refine your search to a specific decade, you can do so by adding that keywords to the search.  

MP3rat allows you to create dynamic search criteria of your music.  No longer will you have to follow the same folder path to a song.  You can just type in a few letters of a keywords you attached to that song and you will find it quickly.  The best feature of all is that this is fully customizable, you get to decide how to define your keywords dictionary and search strings!

The MP3rat search facility is always active, just type in the search field located in the toolbar. MP3rat offers advanced search options such as Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT), exact string searching and incremental searching. See Section 5.2, Searching, for details.

Leaving out the hierarchy of folders was an intentional design choice on our part. The problems with hierarchies are:

• They are slow to traverse, typically done by scrolling and mouse clicking
• They have to be carefully maintained to be useful, If songs are not added to the correct folders, they are effectively useless as you cannot locate them without searching
• Songs do not always fit into predetermined hierarchies: they may fit into multiple folders or not fit into any
• Arbitrary groups of songs cannot be displayed, the only way to view songs is by the folder categorization

MP3rat works independently of the external MP3 players. However, it will communicate with Winamp, MusicMatch, Windows Media Player, RealPlayer, and the default Windows MP3 player to play songs or playlists. Many users find MP3rat so convenient that they cease using the external players altogether.

1.3 Terminology

Bitrate

The sampling rate a mp3 song is constructed with, typically measured in kbit/second.

Color Gradient

A color pattern that gradually migrates from a starting color to an ending color giving the visual presence of a smooth transition.

Dialog Window

A window for user input directed at a specific task. After making changes in a dialog box, you usually need to press OK to accept the changes or Cancel to ignore any changes made. Also known as a dialog box.

Field

Used in this manual to indicate a location that you may type text into. In Windows parlance, this is technically known as an "edit control."

Focus

The window that keyboard input is directed to. This is usually indicated by either a blinking cursor or by a dashed rectangle (such as in a list box).

Grayed Out

Indicates that a control is disabled and the option is not currently available.

ID3v1

A tag format where the data is stored at the end of the mp3 file and is limited in length.

ID3v2

A tag format where the data is stored at the beginning of the mp3 and the field lengths are not constrained.

Keywords

Words that are associated with a song and are used with the keyword search.

Left Click

To click the left most mouse button. Left clicking on an object normally executes a command.

m3u

The file format to store playlists.

mp3

The standard file format to store audio files in a compressed form.

Playlist

A list of mp3 songs that is stored in the m3u format.

Right Click

To click the right most mouse button. Right clicking on an object normally displays a popup menu.

Search Field

An "edit control" located in the toolbar that is used to enter search expressions.

System Tray

The small recessed area normally in the bottom right of the screen.

Tabbed Dialog Window

A Dialog Window that allows users to "tab" between multiple "pages."

Taskbar

The bar normally at the bottom of the screen that contains buttons for each running program.

Toolbar

The list of buttons across the top of the MP3rat window. The Search Field is also located in the toolbar.

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