Why does foobar2000 display a question mark at all for empty columns/fields? Would look much better without the question marks all over the place ...
Why does foobar2000 display a question mark at all for empty columns/fields?
It doesn’t.
It displays ? for fields that are
absent, not empty. The latter will be displayed as-is,
i.e. actually empty.
@dandruff
%artist% %album%[-%date%]
Think some minutes about how useful the square-brackets are and make your conclusion.
I know how to "workaround" it. Maybe a global option would be perfect for this: "Disable question marks display in empty columns"?
This would avoid the need to add "double" user custom columns to "disable" the question marks. Any opinions on that?
Again, question marks are displayed not for empty fields but rather for absent fields.
With such a distinction in mind, it makes sense to have some way to differentiate between the two. And it makes sense to display empty fields as empty!
The corollary is that absent fields are flagged for the user, which is potentially very useful as it could alert them to something that is unintentionally missing from their metadata.
Edit: The original thread doesn’t seem to have any place in the Support subforum; I’ve moved it, and because it was from 2006 I’ve split this new discussion from it.
Although this being a very old thread - I too would prefer not to see the "?" for absent fields / i.e. to be able to configure foobars' display of absent fields...
I had a look around in the preferences - but this is still the default & not-changeable behaviour...?
Would be great to have this as a column relative setting (imo).
Churs.
c.
Your comment makes little sense to me. An empty field is shown as empty, and an absent field as "?". If you don't want to see "?" then don't define the field in the first place. Why would you want to configure the display of something you put in your titleformatting you don't want there to be? Then why did you put it into your titleformatting then?
Also, like db1989 already mention, it's a perfect way to see if something wrong is up with your titleformatting.
Yes, in some cases I would like to see the "?" as an indicator for an absent field.
For others though, for example POPM/Rating, the later specifically for which the standard rating values range from 0-5 for some encoding formats, I would prefer to NOT see the "?" for an absent field (as it is rather hard to visually read/tell apart a ? from a 1 or 2 if it's a long vertical row of single digits).
c.
Just put all tag sourced fields in square brackets [%like this%] and you won't see question marks when fields don't exist. You can also use it with functions [$meta(like this)]. You can be pretty sure there won't be configuration option for this.
Just put all tag sourced fields in square brackets [%like this%] and you won't see question marks when fields don't exist.
Brilliant, I was secretly hoping for some easy work around. Awesome!
Thanks!
c.