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Topic: RFE: Masstagger - guess album from FreeDB (Read 3238 times) previous topic - next topic
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RFE: Masstagger - guess album from FreeDB

Here is a feature that I wish Foobar had and how I would design it to work: masstag the album field of a list of songs based on matches in the FreeDB album repository.

The function would query the FreeDB database to find an album match of both artist and title. If multiple albums exist (i.e. greatest hits and original album), a dialog box would appear, prompting the user to choose one album, which would then be written to the tag. If no albums match the artist and title, then the function would automatically search for album matches of either artist or title. This would also happen if either artist or title were missing. In both cases, the user would be prompted to select a match if there are more than one result.

The user could elect to limit the masstag to those songs in the list which lack information in the album field (i.e. thereby updating only newly added songs).

The user could elect to save the album in lower case only (to eliminate case inconsistencies).

This function could be stacked with other masstagging functions (i.e. guess artist and title from filename, then initiate album tagging based on new artist and title tags).

For tag purists or those simply prone to carpal tunnel syndrome, there might be an option for the user to confirm every album match before writing anything.

Initially, I think it would be easier to query a local database (downloaded from a freedb mirror), since I am unsure if there are limits on how one can query a remote freedb server.

RFE: Masstagger - guess album from FreeDB

Reply #2 –
The referenced plugin really doesn't work in the manner that I want: I want to quickly tag a large collection of existing songs with album title. The artist and title are embedded in the filename and the song may have been tagged with these respective fields.

This plugin, by contrast, seems designed to tag songs associated with the same album (which I could handle much more efficiently when I initially rip the songs from CD using the ripping software).

Some observations:
* The lookup of single songs is very inefficient. There seems a design decision that the album is known and the user just wants additional data. For example, the search fields include artist and album, not artist and song title. Keywords seems to act as an additional limiter but requires manual typing, most notably of the song title. Indeed, if you could search by song title and artist, I am not sure what the point of keywords is.

* There is no parsing of the filename into title and artist, so these must be tagged first.

* Some song titles are parsed as an album and then truncated.

* It only seems to work for remote freeDB archives. I tried to hardcode g:\freedb but that didn't work either.

* every match requires confirmation by the user (though this may be driven by the difficulty in matching album to song title)

* there is no way to control character case

Still, a lot of work clearly went into this plugin and the author should be commended.

RFE: Masstagger - guess album from FreeDB

Reply #3 –
The best alternative for identifying single audio files must be Musicbrainz
http://www.musicbrainz.org

Try downloading their tagger and identify your files with that one.

RFE: Masstagger - guess album from FreeDB

Reply #4 –
The bad news is that the MusicBrainz tagger only supports ID3v2.
Master of Fate. By Fate Mastered

RFE: Masstagger - guess album from FreeDB

Reply #5 –
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This plugin, by contrast, seems designed to tag songs associated with the same album (which I could handle much more efficiently when I initially rip the songs from CD using the ripping software).


That's how freedb is designed. It works with full albums. Only.

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* The lookup of single songs is very inefficient. There seems a design decision that the album is known and the user just wants additional data.


There's no such thing as "lookup of single songs" with freedb. You may get some close matches using full text search + entering album/artist + matching song length, but it will be inaccurate as hell.

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For example, the search fields include artist and album, not artist and song title. Keywords seems to act as an additional limiter but requires manual typing, most notably of the song title. Indeed, if you could search by song title and artist, I am not sure what the point of keywords is.


You can't search for artist AND album, you can only search for artist OR album. That means: search query: "Pink Floyd Dark Side Of The Moon" will return thousands of matches for each separate word, not only the album you want (including albums by this popular "Pink" singer, "Darks Side of the Moog" by Peter Namlook  etc. etc.). Additional filter allows to narrow results to entries that matches more closely your needs (but this is client-side filtering, plugin has to download all ~2000 matches anyway). And since search returns only artist and album, you can't filter by song title (unless you start downloading all actual results one by one).

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* There is no parsing of the filename into title and artist, so these must be tagged first.


I do some primitive parsing, but it works only if file matches "Artist - Title - something.ext" scheme.

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* It only seems to work for remote freeDB archives. I tried to hardcode g:\freedb but that didn't work either.


It works with remote freedb only, because relies on server features (fuzzy album matching and full text search). I've already explained it in "main" foo_freedb thread.

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* there is no way to control character case


heh? You can edit each field separately and control anything you want using tagz formatting functions.

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Still, a lot of work clearly went into this plugin and the author should be commended.


Thanks. But you seem to misunderstand how freedb works. It is designed to return titles for bunch of tracks that meets the following conditions:

- tracks form full, properly sorted (by tracknumber) album
- their lenghts are known precisely enough

Nothing else is required.

Every "search" is just ugly hack based on http://www.freedb.org/freedb_search.php, with all flaws inherited from this search.

RFE: Masstagger - guess album from FreeDB

Reply #6 –
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The bad news is that the MusicBrainz tagger only supports ID3v2.

Yes, and not AP2 nor MPC-format

But at least the Id3v2-tags can be converted without hassle by Case's Tag afterwards using a nifty batch-file.