With tags, you can categorize and select music in Ares. A tag is a short description of the music, e.g. "suspenseful" or
"oriental". When you have defined tags, you can search music through them and in particular select the music during the game.
Tags are put into categories: each tag belongs to one category. With the categories, you can find tags easier and they are
also interesting when playing (see below). Categories are for example "mood" or "situation".
Each tag and each category also has a language assigned, but it can also be translated into other languages.
Tags are independent of projects, or, in other words, they are used for all projects. But you can select for each project
which tags shall be shown in the Player / Controller.
To set tags fro music, select the files (or directories) in the Music Explorer and choose "Edit Tags" from the context menu. Then, you have several possibilities:
You can also set tags fro all files in an exisiting music list. Just choose "Tags" from the context menu of the list in the Project Explorer.
When you have set or downloaded tags, you can upload them again to rpgmusictags.org
and thus share them with other people. The more people share their tags, the larger the database becomes and the higher the
chance to get fitting tags for new files directly will become.
To upload the tags, you use the button "Share ...". You have to enter a user name (e.g. an e-mail address) which is used to
count how many users have assigned a particular tag to a particular music file (see below "Voting"). For uploading, the music
files have to be identified too, of course, but if you have downloaded tags for them previously, the identification has already
been done.
What if you don't agree with the tags you've downloaded from the online database? Then just remove the tag from the music file.
Ares will remember and when you download tags the next time, the tag will stay removed. If you upload tags, however, the online
database will remember that you've removed the tag. As soon as more people have removed the tag than have assigned the tag, the
tag won't be delivered to other users any more.
On the other hand, if you agree with the tags you've downloaded, you should use the button "Confirm". With this, the tags will
be treated as if you had set them yourself manually. That means firstly, that they won't be removed from the file when you
download tags next even if more people have now removed the tag than have added the tag in the mean time. Secondly, it means that
you will give your vote to the tag when next you upload tags. If you don't confirm the tags, they will be disregarded when
uploading, or in other words, you have to say explicitly through the confirmation that you like the tag assignment to vote for
it.
In the Music Explorer you can filter the view with tags. To choose a filter, use the button at the right side in the toolbar
of the Music Explorer. The dialog is similar to the one with which tags are defined; you just choose the tags whose files you
wish to see. Normally, those files are shown which have any of the selected tags. But in the lower part of the dialog,
you can also choose that the files must have a tag from all categories (for which a tag is selected). For example, you could
look for all files of the interpret (that's a category) "Erdenstern" (that's a tag) which have either the mood (category) "dark" or
"suspenseful" (tags again). It's not possible to use "AND" for tags inside a category, e.g. to look for files which
have both the tags "dark" and "suspenseful" (tags in the same category).
To change the filter, select the button again. To remove the filter, select the button and click on "Show all files" in the
dialog. The third option in the filter is to show only files which don't have any tags set; that way,
you can easily find files for which you may still want to set tags.
During playing you can select the tags directly in the Player or Controller (see below). If you need a certain tag selection more often and want to put it onto a button, you can also make it in a "Music by Tags" element. Such an element you can add through the context menu of a mode in the Project Explorer.
With View -> Tags from the main menu or with F5 you can open an editor window where you can manage tags and categories. That is,
you can create new tags and categories as well as rename existing ones (e.g. to correct typing mistakes) or delete them. With
the check box "Hidden" you can prevent that they are shown in the Player / Controller; that's a setting which is saved per
project.
In the lower part of the window, you can translate the tags into other languages. That is useful if you either get tags from
a different language (e.g. through the import of a project) or wish to share them with a friend in a different language.
You can also choose which language will be used in the project for the tags. Apart from the tag management window, there will
always be shown only categories and tags with names in that language.
In macros there are special commands, with which you can change the tag selection during the game and so play the music you want.
In the Player and the Controller, you can automatically let the program find files with given tags; then one of those files
will always be selected and played randomly. If you for example turn on the tags "dark" and "suspenseful", then all music files
are eligible for playing which have either the tag "dark" or the tag "suspenseful" (or both).
The tags can be chosen in a separate area / window which you select in the same way as a mode in the project. You choose first
the category and then you can turn on or turn off the tags of that category.
Just as with filters in the Music Explorer, you can also choose if music must only have one of the tags you turned on or if
it must have a tag from each selected category. If you select "AND" and you have turned on the tags "suspenseful" and "dark"
from the category "mood" as well as the tag "dungeon" from the category "place", only music will be played which has both the tags
"dungeon" and "dark" or both the tags "dungeon" and "suspenseful". For contrast, if you select "OR", music will be played which
has any of those three tags assigned.
You can also select whether music shall be faded out and in when it changes. If it shall not be faded at all, simply set the
fading time to 0. If it shall only be faded when it changes because you have selected different tags, select the checkbox.
(Hint: because of technical reasons, changes here only affect the next played music file, not the currently played one.)
You can't select music through tags as the same time as through music lists. Whenever you select music through one of the
methods, the other one is turned off. That is, a music list is stopped if you select a tag, and all tags are turned off if
you select a music list.
The Tags are saved in a file "Ares.sqlite" in the music directory. The format is a SQLite-database; you can see the scheme here. To identify music files, the service from acoustid.org is used.
