Plasma Active Three released

Posted Oct 16, 2012 5:07 UTC (Tue) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582)
In reply to: Plasma Active Three released by Tara_Li
Parent article: Plasma Active Three released

I organise my music in folders. Most of it is not tagged, but has informative filenames. It would be too much work to tag it all (yes, I can write a script to do it, but still). Plus, I haven't seen a working tag "hierarchy" in any player -- ie, first I choose to see only classical albums, then only a particular composer, then the particular recordings. They dump all genres / all albums / all performers together and it's impossible to navigate even if it's all properly tagged.

So on linux I navigate manually to the directory I want and play it (usually on the command line). On Android I'm still looking for my ideal "folder player", but there are several that are "good enough" for me. But there's no way I can manage my music collection on an OS that doesn't "expose the filesystem".

I'm fairly sure that many people will say the same of books, photos, etc -- they would prefer to organise them hierarchically themselves, rather than rely on tagging!

Plasma Active Three released

Posted Oct 16, 2012 10:01 UTC (Tue) by ovitters (guest, #27950) [Link]

IMO the software should show something meaningful. Putting everything in folders and correcting the names of files took a lot of work. The software should be smart enough to understand all that and show something meaningful.

If the solution is to automatically recognize the music, look at the filename/directory, or anything like that: why care? As long as you can easily select the music you want to listen to.

E.g. I'd care more about something which automatically gives me a happy song if I have a crap day.. or maybe something with a lot of energy.

Something which exposes folders to me: not interested.

Plasma Active Three released

Posted Oct 16, 2012 10:26 UTC (Tue) by intgr (subscriber, #39733) [Link] (11 responses)

> Most of it is not tagged, but has informative filenames. It would be too much work to tag it all (yes, I can write a script to do it, but still).

You should check out MusicBrainz Picard (http://musicbrainz.org/doc/MusicBrainz_Picard), a tagger application that looks up metadata from the MusicBrainz database and allows you to tag, rename, move etc your files based on that information.

> Plus, I haven't seen a working tag "hierarchy" in any player

Agreed, but that's mostly a reflection of the real world -- music is not hierarchical. You have various artist albums, then albums where two artists collaborate and both are primary authors, albums that feature multiple artists but with one primary artist and one-artist albums. And I'm sure classical music has its own complexities too. Even if the players supported all that, most users' tag are such a mess that it wouldn't work anyway. So the easiest approach is to just allow free-form search.

However, after the major NGS schema change, MusicBrainz itself is actually reasonably good at reflecting real life, and allows you to write rather flexible file naming scripts using that data.

Plasma Active Three released

Posted Oct 16, 2012 10:44 UTC (Tue) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link] (10 responses)

I'll give that a try, thanks. The trouble is I have hundreds of albums, mostly ripped into ogg vorbis format from my CDs years ago, using Linux-based rippers of that time which named files intelligently but didn't tag them. And today they all fit onto a thumbnail-sided microSD card and I can play them from my phone whenever I want.

If there is an error-free automated way to tag them all, great. If I have to "curate" the results, it would take forever.

And even then, I'll need the folder structure to maintain a sane organisation. I don't want classical, jazz, rock, world, Indian all mixed up together. I haven't found working genre-based filtering (but maybe I haven't looked too hard, since most of my music doesn't have a correct genre tag.)

Plasma Active Three released

Posted Oct 16, 2012 10:54 UTC (Tue) by intgr (subscriber, #39733) [Link] (3 responses)

> If there is an error-free automated way to tag them all, great

Picard has built-in acoustic fingerprinting, which is mostly error-free, but they don't have fingerprints of all the tracks.

For the rest, yeah, Picard assumes it can find *some* information from the tags. If it doesn't, I guess it'll be lots of manual work. Maybe someone has written a plugin to parse filenames, I don't know.

Plasma Active Three released

Posted Oct 16, 2012 16:15 UTC (Tue) by jnareb (subscriber, #46500) [Link] (1 responses)

> Maybe someone has written a plugin to parse filenames, I don't know.

EasyTag has a feature to generate tags from pathname
(and reverse: rename file based on tags).

Plasma Active Three released

Posted Oct 20, 2012 4:52 UTC (Sat) by dirtyepic (guest, #30178) [Link]

It also has built-in Musicbrainz and CDDB support, can automatically rename files based on format strings (including directory structure), create playlists, etc. etc. It does have a bit of a learning curve and the UI isn't exactly what you'd call intuitive but you can configure just about anything you can think of.

An example workflow: I like to clear any existing tags and fill in the fields by hand (you can use musicbrainz here but I'm anal about how my tracks get named). Then I just save and hit Rename and all my files are renamed based on the tags and my format string and sorted directly into my collection. If it could fetch album cover art from Amazon and lyrics from LyricWiki it'd be perfect.

Plasma Active Three released

Posted Oct 16, 2012 16:47 UTC (Tue) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

Kid3 can make tags based on file paths in batch mode (I also use it to remove comments, album art[1], ENCODEDBY, and other tags I don't want/use).

[1]I much prefer cover.png files instead.

Plasma Active Three released

Posted Oct 16, 2012 21:42 UTC (Tue) by sorpigal (guest, #36106) [Link] (5 responses)

In despair over adequate tag handling I just gave up, years ago. Different players sometimes screw with id3 tags, (e.g. re-tag things like track, year, genre, etc) or use id3 in ogg, or worse. What's more, field lengths can be an issue, as can field counts, etc.. I tried folder hierarchies, too, but gave up on that: tagging is really necessary for cross referencing purposes. My current solution, which is highly sub optimal, is just to dump all files into one big directory (4,567 and counting) with elaborate names, then symlink to multiple hierarchies.

It's some work maintain, but so long as music players don't insist on automatically moving files everything functions. Everything is easily findable by simple file name search in the big directory, or by drilling down the hierarchies.

It would be nice if it were easier, and if more meta data were supported than I can cram in to the file name, but nothing else I've tried approaches this for usability. I wish I had better news.

Plasma Active Three released

Posted Oct 17, 2012 14:36 UTC (Wed) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link] (4 responses)

Media players shouldn't be mucking with tags. I would drop such media players in a heartbeat if I found them. I typically use MPlayer locally with either MPD streaming or local files. Even if MPD gets the "feature" of retagging, all the music is on a read-only nullfs mount in its jail.

If you have "halfway" tags, I'd recommend using picard to tag your music. Most of the work is in "yeah, that looks good" before applying tags fetched from musicbrainz. If there aren't enough tags filled in, picard can fail to auto-match with the database, at which point it's a fairly manual job[1].

[1]Add a "tport=8000" (at least, port 8000 is the default) query parameter to your musicbrainz URL when picard is running. It will then add links to insert release data straight into picard.

Plasma Active Three released

Posted Oct 17, 2012 15:32 UTC (Wed) by sorpigal (guest, #36106) [Link] (3 responses)

> Media players shouldn't be mucking with tags. I would drop such media players in a heartbeat if I found them
You'd be surprised what "popular" players will do, but note that I include in this players with built in tag editors of highly dubious quality.

> If you have "halfway" tags, I'd recommend using picard to tag your music.
I'll give it another look (it's been a while since I tried one of these), but...

tl;dr auto tagging is broken, manual tagging is necessary for correctness

I find that tag-guessing and batch tagging are dangerous. Such services will happily write incorrect tags, possibly overwriting my manually-chosen correct tags.

Consider this scenario: I have a track ripped from a Gilbert & Sullivan "highlights" disc, but I have manually tagged it to indicate which operetta it was from and in what year it was originally produced. An auto tagger may:

(1) Detect that it is from the album I ripped it from and re-tag it with the name of who compiled it, giving it a title based on how the album named it (e.g. "Pirates of Penzance Major General's Song" instead of the correct "I am the very model of a modern major general"), and setting the year to when the CD was released, or setting the genre to "Comedy" instead of "Light Opera"

(2) Identify the album from which the track *originally* came, copying the metadata from that album instead.

(3) Detect that it is a performance of the song, but incorrectly identify the source album as another performance by other persons, copying the incorrect metadata from that album instead.

The result is that I can't sort G&S songs by operetta, year, etc., and in all probability the artist is now listed as whoever produced the recording only, or a haphazard concatenation of original artists with performing artists, possibly without distinction. In my experience the metadata available from common databases tends to be either inaccurate, excessively verbose or organized according to an unpalatable scheme.

This is when it finds my music at all, which in my experience is not common! In the end it becomes a manual process as I feel obliged to manually verify each choice made by the tagger.

Plasma Active Three released

Posted Oct 17, 2012 15:52 UTC (Wed) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link] (1 responses)

Ah. I don't have much classical[1] music, so I tend to not have such problems with my tags.
> In the end it becomes a manual process as I feel obliged to manually verify each choice made by the tagger.

Though picard isn't an "auto tagger" (anymore at least) since it won't write tags without an explicit Ctrl-S to save the (selected) files. Newer picard versions show a diff of the tags in the bottom where you can manually fix things (it's not a full tag editor, so adding new tags isn't possible with it AFAICT), so detecting "picard did it wrong" should be fairly easy with it.

[1]I would expect that simiar issues arise with things such as opera (as you point out), theater, broadway, national anthems, and so on. I guess "performance" pieces is a better name for this type of thing?

Plasma Active Three released

Posted Oct 17, 2012 17:32 UTC (Wed) by sorpigal (guest, #36106) [Link]

> I guess "performance" pieces is a better name for this type of thing?
id3v2 does specify fields for composer, lyricist, original release year, etc.., but many of these are ignored or silently discarded (!) by taggers/players. Ogg comments are just unsuitable for this level of detail, because there's little agreement on what fields can be expected to exist beyond a very basic, limited set.

Plasma Active Three released

Posted Oct 17, 2012 16:52 UTC (Wed) by intgr (subscriber, #39733) [Link]

> tl;dr auto tagging is broken, manual tagging is necessary for correctness

Well, ideally, you would enter all relevant information into a global database and simply configure your tagger to store the tags based on your preferences; that way you don't have to do redundant manual work and benefit from data that others have entered.

> I have manually tagged it to indicate which operetta it was from and in what year it was originally produced
> giving it a title based on how the album named it (e.g. "Pirates of Penzance Major General's Song" instead of the correct "I am the very model of a modern major general"), and setting the year to when the CD was released

Of course people have a different understanding of "correctness". The MusicBrainz schema is fairly flexible, there are three levels of detail:
1. Track as labeled on an album track list
2. Recording, which links all different releases/tracks of the same recording
3. Optionally, there's "work", which collects together recordings of a single work, but can also relate to other works such as the opera.

Sounds like what you want is to actually store the attributes (title and date) of the work (#3) in your tags, not the track list (#1). Now, Picard itself doesn't support this, but my point is that MusicBrainz isn't like the CDDB databases that only knew about track lists. MusicBrainz a first-class music database and the community actually cares about correctness. With some additional code it would be possible to fetch all the relevant details you care about.

Not all editors enter information at this detail -- and earlier versions didn't have all these capabilities. But that's a small matter of going in and entering/fixing the data, which you already have to do when building your directory structure anyway.

> or setting the genre to "Comedy" instead of "Light Opera"

MusicBrainz doesn't support genres as such because (as you point out) people often have wildly different understanding of genres. But it does provide a "folksonomy tags" feature. Picard can be configured to only accept genres that you personally have entered, or set a threshold on how popular the tag has to be to be applied.

Plasma Active Three released

Posted Oct 17, 2012 15:21 UTC (Wed) by lambda (subscriber, #40735) [Link] (5 responses)

Have you ever used iTunes or an iPod? They each handle the use cases you mention.

In iTunes, I have 4 main columns on my screen. The first is for playlists, which are how you organize ad-hoc lists of songs. Folders are a pretty bad way of managing that use case, unless you use folders full of symlinks and add a number to the beginning of each name to get the sorting right. Trying to set up such a system on a touchscreen device using a generic filesystem explorer seems like it would be a usability nightmare.

The remaining columns form the tag hierarchy. The first is Genres, the next Artists, and then there is a list of songs grouped by Album, then sorted by number within the album. Each of the first two columns has an "All" at the top, and you can select multiple within them. So, for instance, since I have genres that were taken from CDDB, they aren't always consistent; I have both "Alternative & Punk" and "Alternative Rock", but I can select both of those, and I see in the Artists column only those artists who have songs tagged "Alternative & Punk" or "Alternative Rock". I can then narrow the songs down even further by selecting one or more artists, and only see the songs that those artists have done.

If I have any more complex needs than that, I can create a saved search (called "Smart Playlist"), which selects on any attributes that I want. And if I want to find a specific song by name, I just type it into the search box and it filters live down to that song.

This provides a lot more flexibility than a generic hierarchical filesystem browser, and take a lot less work for me to maintain. For the most part, everything is organized automatically by tags that I get from CDDB; all I do is build my playlists, and otherwise I browse or search for songs.

This is one of the many small things that keeps me using Mac OS X as my main OS, even though I refuse to buy anything new from Apple (I bought this laptop around the introduction of the original iPhone; the iPhone was the tipping point that convinced me that Apple was enough of a threat to my freedom that I will no longer support them). I am glad that some people are trying to attack this problem; trying to provide interfaces that are just as easy to use. Since it's free software, there will always be ways to access the underlying filesystem, so people will be able to create more traditional filesystem browsers. But for many of my use cases, I really don't want to bother with trying to sort files into a hierarchy and come up with naming schemes that cause them to sort properly and link them together with symlinks, I want to just be able to search and sort files based on their inherent attributes.

Plasma Active Three released

Posted Oct 17, 2012 22:35 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (3 responses)

The remaining columns form the tag hierarchy. The first is Genres, the next Artists, and then there is a list of songs grouped by Album, then sorted by number within the album.

As an aside, it is hard to imagine just how worthless this is for classical music. With the exception of iPods old enough to run Rockbox on, the whole line of players is simply useless for classical music. Let's see, I have three recordings of the Goldberg Variations, the two by Gould and one other -- and what does the iPod's cruddy built-in non-free software do? It lumps them all into one, if I'm very lucky, or gives them all the same name and does not differentiate between recordings, otherwise: last I saw it didn't even provide a way to distinguish between composer and performer, let alone multiple performances of the same work. If I'm *very* lucky it keeps the variations within each performance in the right order, otherwise they get jumbled up as well. How helpful. (And as for including things like the opus number(s) of the works, just forget it.)

Plasma Active Three released

Posted Oct 18, 2012 6:28 UTC (Thu) by ncm (guest, #165) [Link] (1 responses)

Rockbox doesn't only work on old players. It runs on current Sandisk devices.

Plasma Active Three released

Posted Oct 18, 2012 8:33 UTC (Thu) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link]

The OP (GP) was talking about ipod / itunes specifically.

Plasma Active Three released

Posted Oct 18, 2012 8:38 UTC (Thu) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link]

This is exactly why I use folder players (and refuse to buy any Apple product). I still have a problem choosing sane folder names for classical music, that aren't hundreds of characters long. But it's better than tagging.

What I've ended up doing is a composer directory; inside that, a performance/piece directory; inside that, track files whose filenames describe only the piece and movement, not composer/performer. It mostly works, but some multi-composer discs require other treatment.

Plasma Active Three released

Posted Oct 18, 2012 3:51 UTC (Thu) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link]

I have tried itunes, thank you -- my wife's Mac has it. Fine for rock/pop music (though I still prefer pretty much linux-based program I've seen). Awful for anything else. She doesn't use it often either. But this is a general feature of Apple -- it's great if you want to do exactly what they want you to do. If you want to do something else, you're out of luck.

Plus, itunes doesn't do ogg vorbis files.

Plasma Active Three released

Posted Oct 18, 2012 8:14 UTC (Thu) by smcv (subscriber, #53363) [Link]

Relying on semantic tagging can work, but only if the software interpreting the semantic tags has the same interpretation you do.

One of my pet hates in MeeGo/Maemo Harmattan is that the media player copes poorly with "Various Artists" compilations. I can either navigate by album (which sorts alphabetically by album, so e.g. the Nine Inch Nails albums aren't grouped together) or by artist, which really means artist/album (treating a 10-track compilation as if it was 10 1-track albums by different artists).

What makes that particularly annoying is that the directory hierarchy on the actual filesystem follows the Musicbrainz Picard defaults - "AlbumArtist/Album/01. Artist - Track.ogg" - so if I was able to navigate according to the filesystem, all the compilations would be under "Various Artists" where I expect to find them.

I'm not sure whether the bug here is "media player doesn't let me navigate the filesystem" or "media player doesn't understand ALBUMARTIST tags" or both...

Plasma Active Three released

Posted Oct 18, 2012 16:24 UTC (Thu) by Tara_Li (guest, #26706) [Link]

Well, it's not just the tagging that I'm concerned with.

There's this database - and it holds information on 20,000 pictures. Pretty fair chance, in fact, that even holds the pictures themselves, the way things are going. This whole huge database gets searched for just a few pictures, that I tend to keep together anyway. I don't need half of my RAM holding indexes for all of this metadata crap.