Some of these problems (like creators with the same name) have been solved by librarians years ago.
The music classifying nightmare
11–20 of 77 posts
Re: The music classifying nightmare
#12Have you tried Quodlibet? https://code.google.com/p/quodlibet/
It comes with a Musicbrainz plugin which allows you to select an album in your library and search for it on musicbrainz (e.g. by artist name and year or number of tracks-- so you really dont need to have much info) and then you can select a match (there are usually many releases of a given album and it will actually differentiate between them) and then tag your album with the musicbrainz tags.
In fact you don't even need to use quodlibet to get this feature. It has a separate tagging component called "ex falso" which you can run standalone and then use the player of your choice.
But I would strongly recommend Quodlibet for its organizational capabilities as well. For example it uses special internal tags (not id3 but stored in a separate db) that allow you to associate "people" and "performers" to a track so that the track will appear when you search for any of those people.
Also there are sort tags that allow you to customize where stuff shows up, e.g. I can have a track with Artist tag "London Symphony Orchestra", composer tag "Ludwig von Beethoven" (the proper ID3 tags) BUT I give it the artistsort tag "Beethoven" so it shows up under B. Perfect!
See https://code.google.com/p/quodlibet/wiki/AudioTags or more info.
Lastly it has regex search! And you can make "saved searhes" e.g. playlists. And it's lightweight and has an uncluttered (but highly customizable) interface. And it's very easy to write plugins for it.
Re: The music classifying nightmare
#13It looks like the author has come to an understanding with his/her disorganized music collection, but beets makes it pretty easy to bring sanity back to a messy music library: http://beets.radbox.org
Re: The music classifying nightmare
#14I feel your pain. I have also stopped caring about music classifying, for much the same reasons you listed. Nowadays I use only Spotify, and I trust in their tagging abilities, and in Last.FM's auto-correcting ability. My main concern when I used foobar used to be how to handle multiple artists on the same album, which always resulted in the album being split up when displayed in a list. I was unbelievably happy when…
Last.fm and Spotify generally give me terrible recommendations and no discovery at all. I think this is because they use machine learning on the person track graph to determine which tracks are related, so they're very good at finding you DragonForce or IOSYS, but very bad at finding you Hammers of Misfortune, Gallowbraid, Umbrella, or ｍ’ｓ. Of course, if you listen to music that Last.fm thinks is adjacent to IOSYS or DragonForce, you've probably already heard of IOSYS or DragonForce.
Pandora doesn't have this issue because they use human analysts to determine the properties of the tracks and give you similar tracks rather than tracks that are listened to by similar people. Unfortunately their music library is pretty limited. Google Music's automatic playlist feature does something similar without the human analysts, but this only works if you already have all the music you want and it fits onto your Google Music account. They don't seem to provide an option to pay for extra space.
Re: The music classifying nightmare
#15You're making the problem a lot harder than it needs, or ought, to be. The most telling example, IMO, is the Aphex Twin one...
> Oh, and his real name is Richard David James. What are you
> supposed to use for the file system directories and files
> name? His name? The most common nickname? Both? One file
> system solution is to have symbolic links (do you link
> Richard David James to Aphex Twin, or vice versa?). For
> tags, if you don't want to lose information, this is
> another story...
Many of your nightmare scenarios appear to be a result of the same kind of over-thinking, or invention of nonsensical requirements. How are you supposed to deal with Japanese artist names? It literally doesn't matter—pick a scheme you can understand, and be consistent. How are you supposed to deal with multiple artists? List them, separated by commas, in the artist field. If they appear on an album released by a different group or person, use the "album artist" ID3 field. And since (if?) you use the ID3 fields to store your metadata, and presumably navigate your collection through an interface over that metadata, all of your questions regarding how to store files physically on disk are totally irrelevant, as long as you pick some scheme which doesn't generate conflicts. The default iTunes structure (Artist/Album/01 - Song Title.mp3) seems to work fine, for example.
Re: The music classifying nightmare
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's irrelevant, it's either ripped from one or the other, and that's the information that should be there. Lookinng up on which albums a song has appeared should be a database / wikipedia lookup. Think about it, is it relevant on which christmas compilations "so this is christmas" has appeared?
It's not irrelevant. If the exact same recording of a song appears on two albums, an ideal categorization system would allow it to appear as such without storing multiple (redundant) copies of the song. An easy way to think of it is a normalized relational database. If the song has an id of 5 and is on two albums with id 2 and 3, then there would be an AlbumSong join table with schema (album_id, song_id) and two rows…
Each album is going to be mastered separately, and thus include slightly different tweaks (to volume, compression, whatever). You'll almost never see the exact same audio file stored twice.
Re: The music classifying nightmare
#17It looks like the author has come to an understanding with his/her disorganized music collection, but beets makes it pretty easy to bring sanity back to a messy music library: http://beets.radbox.org
Thanks for the tip, beets looks great. I use quodlibet on my laptop but this looks perfect for my squeezebox server where a GUI is inconvenient.
Re: The music classifying nightmare
#18Have you tried Quodlibet? https://code.google.com/p/quodlibet/ It comes with a Musicbrainz plugin which allows you to select an album in your library and search for it on musicbrainz (e.g. by artist name and year or number of tracks-- so you really dont need to have much info) and then you can select a match (there are usually many releases of a given album and it will actually differentiate between them) and then ta…
Nice, I'm sure a lot of people would be interested in trying this.
But talking to myself, I'm disgusted with all of this, so I'm just maintaining my mess in its current state for now.
Still, I like to see such solution, and I'd be really interested in a counter article to what I wrote dealing with each issue. Even if at the end, I will likely not use the given solution.
About the regex search, I'm not sure that's really the solution to the "textual problem". As mentioned in the article, the music content retrieval system is in my opinion the future. Echonest and similar services are trying to achieve something like this. Looking for one artist isn't really what you actually want most of the time. It's likely you are looking for good music, and just want to listen to things who sound "like this".
Re: The music classifying nightmare
#19Oh god, I tried renaming files on my own (and I'm kind of a beginner programmer). Then I found out about unicode problems and then came 2 problems.
problem #1 was apparently I set the encoding wrong while renaming the ID3 for the music files so the foreign languages turned into question marks. I thought scratch that, time to use someone else's tool. foobar2000 solved everything I had a problem with except problem #2.
for problem #2, I have no idea if it'll ever be solved. The question marks or blank boxes ending up on my computer deal with the encoding for the OS itself (or something). And even with multi-language support, windows doesn't let me fix that. There's obviously something wrong when my blank box issue disappears when I restart my computer from time to time...
Re: The music classifying nightmare
#20Have you tried Quodlibet? https://code.google.com/p/quodlibet/ It comes with a Musicbrainz plugin which allows you to select an album in your library and search for it on musicbrainz (e.g. by artist name and year or number of tracks-- so you really dont need to have much info) and then you can select a match (there are usually many releases of a given album and it will actually differentiate between them) and then ta…
Nice, I'm sure a lot of people would be interested in trying this. But talking to myself, I'm disgusted with all of this, so I'm just maintaining my mess in its current state for now. Still, I like to see such solution, and I'd be really interested in a counter article to what I wrote dealing with each issue. Even if at the end, I will likely not use the given solution. About the regex search, I'm not sure that's rea…
Sorry-- I was unclear. The regex is not for organization. It's just an easy and flexible way to browse subsets of your library, like smart playlists in iTunes, but more powerful.