#musicbrainz

Yeah

It's awful, but it gets the job done

well bmpx will get the job done too :P

Excellent =D

if you get Linux running on the machine you should really try it out, you could be surprised how simple and effective it deals with retagging files

it also has provisions for usual borkages like

where you have a set of files where e.g. the casing of the album is different

e.g. "Some album" vs. "Some Album"

they are of course listed distinct in the library

but you can just select them both, use the retagging dialog, find the right release, and group them together

or any number of albums for that matter

and collections solve the "i have a bunch of files that i want to keep together in my library but which are unrelated otherwise" problem

So here's another thing that I was just having a problem with

you just create a collection where the main attribute is the path, and it creates a collection item with all those tracks

Can you distinguish between the two? =D

yeah if they have a different release id

Sweet

otherwise if they are manually tagged it's of course not possible

i mean

no app could do that if the names are identical

http://musicbrainz.org/release/ae147f6c-8a98-4d... and http://musicbrainz.org/release/a5eade3a-a96a-4a...

1994 and 2001 respectively

but having an additional criterion like the release id it's no problem, bmpx would list them separately

It sure doesn't work in iTunes =D

heh well it works on BMPx LOL

Note that even MB fetches the wrong album art

The art for the 1994 album in MB is the art on the actual 2001 album

Oh, and if you don't support manual tagging, what about Genre tags?

yeah those are untouched

i don't know what to do with them

And one last question; I'm sure you get this a lot

With win32 ports of gtk and gstreamer, would you accept patches for a win32 build environment? =D

yeah at ANY time

(of course that would be after gstreamer on windows stops sucking; I tried it and can't get it to work)

we already tried to build it on win32

but we didn't pursue it further because of it being so problematic, and of course general app development has priority

If I had a whole lot of spare time I'd give it a shot

so if you could provide help there we'd take it at any time

Unfortunately I'm crazy busy

But I'm sure once GStreamer on Windows shapes up, somebody will do it

Oh my god.

Who made people in charge of this site?

Which site? MB?

Yes.

My sister has more common sense and intelligence than someone of the people with the ability to vote on edits.

erh

That's life

This site is going to fall because of the half-assed styles on tracks.

I once spent half an hour working on entering a really challenging album, and had it all lost when some newbie downvoted it for no reason

Landus, example?

I've found MB to be getting better and better since I started using it

The current debate I'm having is here.

For the entire album.

It makes no sense to completely botch the track name.

By adding in in the album name into the track name.

It's pointless and ruins the track name.

I hate to break it to you, but you'll probably be in the minority there

Regardless of what the style guys say.

Guides, rather.

I know.

That's why I'm ready to holler at the majority of the site.

It's being run by people that don't really know how to tag music correctly.

You might want to take a look at how many edits keschte has :P

There is -no- reason to justify putting the album name in the track name of an entire album.

It's kinda hard to tell somebody with 82,000 edits that he doesn't know how to tag music =D

No. He apparently doesn't.

He's one of the users that's quickly getting on my nerves.

Anyone that justfies tagging an entire album by putting the album name in the track name, regardless of what sort of CD it is, doesn't deserve to make descisions on tags.

I know what's different about this CD. I own it.

I agree it does look a little weird on that particular album

But MB has already broken my soul and now I submit to community consensus no matter what I think =D

Give it enough time and the wrong person with enough knowledge on wikipedia security issues and competely dismantles the site out of anger.

I've seen it happen before on other sites.

Perhaps

It's rather sad.

But that's what backups are for

Because this site has alot of potential.

Backups won't be up-to-date.

They can be

And in the case of a database, probably are

Probably weekly updates, and alot of edits can happen a day.

I'm not an expert on databases but my understanding is that they're designed from the ground up to deal with such things

Neither am I. It's a matter of who's maintaining the database.

If it was me, it'd be a daily backup that would modify the existing backup to include the changes inthe last 24 hours.

deadchip, I suppose that's another problem with your philosophy for BMPx: It doesn't really accomodate people who have qualms with the Musicbrainz Style Guidelines =D

yeah

well

i just believe in one canonical source for metadata

and if there is anything like it (style and so on issues aside) then it's MB

Yeah

If I had the time and money, I'd open my own server using MB tags.

An other source would have the same issue

yeah true

So it wouldn't be open to people with no knowledge of how to properly tag music.

One possible (but I guess a little far-fetched) solution would be to make MB robust enough that you can choose the style yourself

All it would really take is acknowledgement that this album is to be tagged according to whatever style guideline, then you could do whatever string processing magic you like

Could go for that, but it's pointless.

The people that vote no on perfectly sensical changes are just people to cause waves, or those who have a small, or non-existant grasp on how to tag things correctly.

Think of someone was making filenames based on data from MB.

I uh, hate to say it, but I think you might be considering your opinions to be facts here :P

I sometimes do.

Don't hate to say it.

I get that aggrivated where I do.

And I forget.

Anyway, if filenames were being made in an %artist% - %trackname% format would look botched beyond recognition if it was with the album I put a link to.

Well, if you really feel strongly enough about it, you can write up a detailed argument and send it to the appropriate mailing list

I have twice tried to get style changes pushed through, once regarding style for video game and anime OSTs (which did result in a consensus, but not the one I hoped for) and once for OCReMixStyle (which did result in the consensus I hoped for)

what kind of style changes are you talking about btw?

i'm not sure i get what you mean

you mean stuff like track name casing etc?

In this case Landus was talking about the application of ClassicalStyle/PartNumberStyle to a Dream Theater album

I don't really have strong feelings either way. It does seem a little weird

uh

Actually, looking at the album cover, I kinda agree with the style guideline

well i agree with this:

Second, what you're referring to is a gapless CD. An annotation can be made, rather than botching the track name for each track.

That's true

But when you look at the way the back cover phrases it, it does make it clear that each section is a part of "Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence"

The ClassicalStyleGuide page can be agreed to or not

hmmmm

right well, after looking at it for a while more, it's not all so obvious anymore

It is sort of a weird case, but since there does seem to be a community consensus, I don't think I'd personally argue with it

Yo deadchip, if you want an example of the XML exports, http://acm.cs.umn.edu/~holme215/5star.xml

That's from "Export Song List"; there's also "Export Library"

They seem to look the same

Note that "Rating" is an integer between 0 and 100; iTunes only lets you select an integer number of stars (0-5) but internally it stores them as 0,20, 40, 60, 80 or 100

It seems to store its smart playlist criteria in some bizarre encoding, but other than that it's all pretty straightforward

Oh, Landus

That would be another solution: make it so that MB understands the grouping

Then they could appear just as on the album cover

I just recommended that in an edit reply not even two minutes ago.

Or suggested it.

Heh

Keep in mind that alot of my CD's have been stolen by people I've lent them to and they've never been returned.

I used a program called VBRfix and it completely obliterated the tags on the songs I ran through it.

So when I use Picard to set the tags right and the information I'm getting is incorrect.

And I get crap when I fix it, I become to get annoyed.

This is a pretty challenging thing to come up with a DB schema for

It probably is the right solution though

I could think of a way to do it, but I doubt I'd be able to suggest how to code it.

It would be cool if MB understood tracks split into parts when they're technically one track on the album, too, like Green Day's "Jesus of Suburbia", etc

It would basically be like allowing a track to have sub-tracks

Oh, that track pisses me off.

And making MB agnostic to whether or not a "track" corresponds to a file

The way that one works.